Mercredi, le 16 octobre, 2013
Neutralité de l'État, Liberté de religion et Tolérance : La Part des Choses
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Attacks Against Syria: Another Illegal War Based on Manipulation and False Pretenses?
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Surveillance, Secrecy and Control in the Age of Big Brother
Friday, June 14, 2013
The Real Obama's Bent on Killing Innocent People with Remote-controlled Drones
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
The Iraq War Fiasco, Ten Years Later
Thursday, March 7, 2013
A More Than Questionable Bernanke Fed Monetary Policy
Thursday, February 7, 2013
The U.S. Congress: From One Crisis to Another
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Mercredi, le 16 octobre, 2013
Neutralité de l'État, Liberté de religion et Tolérance : La Part des Choses
de Rodrigue Tremblay, économiste
Auteur du livre “Le Code pour une éthique globale, vers une civilisation humaniste”, Éditions Liber, 2009.
« Même si la laïcité 'ouverte' a l’air sympa, il faut comprendre que c’est l’abstention de la puissance publique qui garantit la plus large liberté d’opinion et d’affichage. Les religions y ont tout intérêt, car cette abstention stricte les protège des ingérences de l’État. Comme elle protège l’État des religions et les religions les unes des autres. »
Catherine Kintzler (1947- ), philosophe française, spécialiste de l' esthétique et de la laïcité
« Je considère que toutes les grandes religions du monde, le bouddhisme, l'hindouisme, le christianisme, l'islam et le communisme, sont à la fois fausses et néfastes.... Je suis aussi fermement convaincu que les religions sont nuisibles que je le suis qu'elles sont fausses. »
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosophe britannique, Prix Nobel Prize de Littérature en 1950, (auteur du livre Pourquoi je ne suis pas un chétien, 1927)
« Je pense qu'il n'y a pas de forces sur cette planète qui soient plus dangereuses pour nous tous que les fanatismes du fondamentalisme, de toute nature : le protestantisme, le catholicisme, le judaïsme, l'islam, l'hindouisme et le bouddhisme, ainsi que d'innombrables autres petites infections. –Existe-t-il ici un conflit entre la science et la religion? Il ya en un très certainement. »
Daniel C. Dennett (1942- ), philosophe américain, (auteur de L'Idée dangereuse de Darwin, 1996)
Dans mon livre “Le Code pour une éthique globale, vers une civilisation humaniste”, (Éditions Liber, 2009), il y a trois chapitres qui touchent aux questions qui sont présentement soulevées par le projet de Charte des valeurs québécoises du Gouvernement du Québec concernant la neutralité de l'État en matière religieuse. Il s'agit du chapitre Trois sur “La tolérance dans les sociétés ouvertes et démocratiques”, le chapitre Six sur la nécessaire “Séparation de l'Église et de l'État” et le chapitre Onze sur “Les limites des systèmes de tolérance”. Le grand principe que je défends est celui-ci : « La façon dont les gens mènent leur vie est leur affaire, pour autant que leur choix ne porte pas préjudice aux autres. »
La neutralité de l'État en matière religieuse soulève, en effet, la question des droits et des libertés individuels face à ceux de l'ensemble des citoyens. D'une part, les individus ont le droit de pratiquer la religion qu'ils veulent (ou de ne pas pratiquer) et ils ont droit de parole et d'expression. D'autre part, le gouvernement de tous a l'obligation morale d'être neutre en matière religieuse quand il dispense des services publics accessibles à tous et dans son administration.
Dans les circonstances, la question se pose : est-ce que l'État peut exiger de ses employés qu'ils s'abstiennent de porter des signes ostentatoires religieux (comme il le fait pour les insignes politiques) afin de faire respecter la neutralité étatique dans la dispense de services publics à l'ensemble des citoyens?
À cette question je répondrai un oui sans équivoque, parce que les droits individuels dans une société démocratique ne sont jamais absolus. Le droit de parole, par exemple, ne signifie point qu'une personne peut crier “Au Feu” dans un théâtre sans motif valable. De même, le droit de pratiquer une religion ne signifie point qu'une personne a le droit d'importuner ou de violenter une autre personne dans sa vie privée, ou d’imposer ses vues et pratiques à l’ensemble de la population.
C'est pourquoi, il est tout à fait légitime qu’un État démocratique, qui se doit d'être neutre dans ses rapports avec l'ensemble des citoyens, exige de ses employés de ne point afficher des signes religieux personnels ostentatoires dans l'exercice de leurs fonctions. Il s’agit d’une question de bonne gérance. Agir autrement signifierait que l'État privilégie le bien-être et la satisfaction personnels de ses employés au dépens de ceux de sa clientèle captive.
Un État démocratique neutre se doit de respecter la liberté de conscience de l'ensemble de ses commettants et, en conséquence, de dispenser des services publics qui ne s'accompagnent point de messages religieux ostentatoires auxquels sa clientèle n'a pas le choix de se soustraire.
En effet, les employés gouvernementaux représentent l'autorité de l'État et à ce titre doivent faire preuve de réserve dans leurs rapports avec le public à cause justement de l’autorité qu’ils représentent. Ainsi, les usagers sont en droit d'exiger de n'être ni intimidés ni violentés dans leurs convictions lorsqu'ils s'adressent aux divers organismes publics. Par exemple, un inspecteur d’impôt qui vous visiterait en affichant des signes religieux ostentatoires serait en position de vous intimider. Cela est doublement vrai quand des usagers sont de jeunes enfants en position d’une plus grande vulnérabilité.
Dans la sphère privée, quand il y a concurrence entre différents fournisseurs, les choses se présentent autrement, car tout acheteur ou consommateur a la liberté de choisir entre différentes sources d'approvisionnement, et cela en toute liberté. Dans ce cas, le principe de tolérance peut s'appliquer.
Mais, tel n'est pas le cas avec l'État-monopole à qui tous doivent s'adresser obligatoirement pour obtenir les services que l'ensemble des contribuables financent avec les taxes et les impôts qui leur sont imposés. Dans ce cas, le principe de la neutralité religieuse de l'État doit s'appliquer intégralement sans quoi ce sont les droits de l'ensemble de la population qui sont brimés et cela sans recours.
Au Québec, selon la Charte des droits et libertés, « toute personne est titulaire des libertés fondamentales telles la liberté de conscience, la liberté de religion, la liberté d'opinion, la liberté d'expression, la liberté de réunion pacifique et la liberté d'association », (chap. I-3). Mais, selon une clause interprétative, il est bien prévu que ces droits individuels ne sont pas absolus mais doivent plutôt s'exercer « dans le respect des valeurs démocratiques, de l'ordre public et du bien-être général des citoyens du Québec ». (Charte des droits et libertés, chap. I-9.1)
De toute évidence, vouloir imposer ses convictions religieuses à l'ensemble de la population pour une personne qui travaille pour l'État ne respecte pas «les valeurs démocratiques, l'ordre public et le bien-être général des citoyens du Québec ».
C'est pourquoi, il me semble que le gouvernement du Québec est en droit de légiférer démocratiquement pour confirmer et appliquer sa neutralité religieuse et pour protéger «les valeurs démocratiques, l'ordre public et le bien-être général des citoyens du Québec ».
Ceci n'enfreint en rien le droit de chacun de pratiquer sa religion comme il ou elle l'entend. Comme l'a judicieusement précisé un juge en chef de la Cour Suprême américaine, le juge Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), « "Le gouvernement civil ne peut pas laisser un groupe en particulier piétiner les autres simplement parce que leur conscience leur enjoint de le faire. » En effet, la liberté des uns s'arrête là où la liberté des autres commence.
De plus, même si le gouvernement du Québec n'a jamais entériné la Constitution canadienne de 1982, et même si le peuple québécois ne s'est jamais prononcé en faveur de la dite Constitution par la voie d'un référendum démocratique, la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés qui en fait partie contient elle aussi une clause interprétative selon laquelle les droits et libertés individuels ne sont pas absolus et peuvent être restreints « dans des limites qui soient raisonnables et dont la justification puisse se démontrer dans le cadre d'une société libre et démocratique, (Chap. I).
Le laisser-aller dans les accoutrements des employés de l'État pour ouvrir la porte au prosélytisme religieux est une négation du principe de neutralité de l'État et il est contraire aux règles d'une saine gestion dans la dispense des services publics. Ce serait contraire à la paix et l'ordre dans une société démocratique où les droits de certains ne doivent pas prévaloir sur ceux de tous.
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Thursday, September 5, 2013
Attacks Against Syria: Another Illegal War Based on Manipulation and False Pretenses?
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
"Their [pro-Israel neocon] plan, which urged Israel to re-establish 'the principle of preemption,' has now been imposed by (Richard) Perle,(Douglas) Feith, (David) Wurmser & Co. on the United States."
"I wasn't afraid to clash with [U.S. President Bill] Clinton. ... I wasn't afraid to clash with the United Nations. . . . I know what America is. America is something that can easily be swayed."
Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, (in the West Bank Israeli settlement of Ofra in 2001)
[There] “is a memo [at the Pentagon] that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO (1997-2000), (March 2, 2007)
"The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are U.S. sources and some are those of other countries. Some of the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to."
Colin L. Powell, George W. Bush's Secretary of State, remarks to the United Nations Security Council (on February 5, 2003)
“We don’t know what the chain of custody is. This could’ve been an Israeli false flag operation, it could’ve been an opposition in Syria... or it could’ve been an actual use by [the government of] Bashar al Assad. But we certainly don’t know with the evidence we’ve been given. And what I’m hearing from the intelligence community is that that evidence is really flakey."
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, “Israel may be behind Syrian chemical weapons use”, Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2013, (about reports of chemical weapons used in Syria)
“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them.”
Mark Twain (1835-1910), American author and satirist
“Lying and war are always associated. Listen closely when you hear a war-maker try to defend his current war: If he moves his lips he's lying.”
Philip Berrigan (1923-2002), American peace activist and former Roman Catholic priest
The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has categorically denied that it launched a poison chemical attack on August 21, 2013, against its own civilian population. Rather, it has pointed to Syrian rebels who are alleged to have recently carried out three such chemical weapon attacks against Syrian soldiers in the same area of the country.
Simple logic would also seem to be on the side of the Syrian government. Indeed, it would have been most idiotic for the Assad regime to launch a chemical attack against its own civilian people, especially a few days after the arrival of a U.N. chemical weapons inspection team (led by Ake Sellstrom with a 14-day mandate), on August 18, and knowing full well that this would most likely bring forth a foreign military intervention.
On the other hand, if there ever was a perfect timing for such a crime, it was for the rebels. Indeed, over the last few months, the Syrian rebels have been pushed back by the Syrian army, and such an horrific and immoral act makes a lot of sense, since it could be enough to provoke the hesitant Obama administration to come to their rescue. It is well known that the first question in a crime investigation is 'who benefits most from the crime'? In this case, the answer is unequivocal, and it is the rebels in Syria and the countries that back and arm them.
Nevertheless, the Obama administration is quickly jumping to believe a report of the Israeli Mossad, based upon some mysterious intercepted phone conversations between unknown Syrian officials that the August 21 chemical attack, presumably with a nerve gas agent, like sarin, was carried out by the Syrian army. That the U.S. government stands ready to launch an illegal military attack against a sovereign country without the United Nations Security Council's authorization on the basis of a Mossad report and on simple deductions is very bizarre. To launch an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign country on the basis of a report from the Israeli Mossad would seem to be the summum of irresponsibility and of naivety.
For one, the Israeli Mossad is known for its expertise in false flag operations. Secondly, there are reports that the Israeli secret police has been very active in Syria and has carried out covert operations in that country. Keep in mind that the Mossad's motto, taken from the Bible, is: “By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt do War.” Therefore, it does not hide its methods of operation. According to insiders, the Mossad is expert inpulling off 'false flag operations', and it maintains an active spy network in many countries, especially in the USA, using fake passports.
And thirdly, the Mossad has done it before.
A former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, described in two New York Times best seller books entitled "By Way of Deception" (St Martins Press, 1990) and The Other Side of Deception(Harpercollins, 1994) how the Israeli Mossad operates. Consider that, according to Ostrovsky, the Mossad succeeded in fooling American President Ronald Reagan and tricking him into bombing Lybia in 1986, when it used faked pre-recorded radio messages with the misinformation that Lybia was about to launch a massive terror attack on the West.
Now, the Mossad claims that it has intercepted phone calls between Syrian officials regarding a chemical attack, but does not give details and refuses to release the material evidence. There is, therefore, a good chance that these so-called 'intercepted' calls were staged to obtain the desired effect. That would be par for the course.
In a word, we may have here a machination that has all the signs of other staged coups, like the 'Bay of Tonkin' coup that President Lyndon B. Johnson used in 1964 to attack North Vietnam and like the ‘weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’ hoax that George W.Bush and Dick Cheney used to launch an attack against Iraq in 2003. —We all remember how U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that he had “seen the evidence.” We also remember that the Head of the CIA said that there was a 'slam dunk' case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that proved to have been most inaccurate and a false pretext for war.
Pro-Israel sycophants in Washington D.C. then were pushing for a U.S. attack of Iraq, as they are now pushing for a U.S. attack of Syria, using similar bogus intelligence “proofs.” Keep in mind that the same group of sycophants advised the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996 “to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program.” Anybody who has not read their report entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” cannot really understand what has happened in the Middle East since, and why the Israeli government has wished ever since to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus.
There are numerous other examples when similar disinformation and manipulation have been relied upon to persuade a reluctant public to accept war.
In October 1990, George W. Bush's father, George H., used the subterfuge of babies who supposedly had been taken out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and let die by the Saddam Hussein Iraki regime so that Iraqi babies could have the incubators, a claim that turned out to be a total fabrication. —Each time a government is circulating photos of dead babies to justify a military aggression, one has to ask if this is not part of a campaign of artful disinformation to manipulate public opinion.
When it comes to the U.S. government to justify military aggression abroad, its credibility is very low indeed.
It is a sad fact that even in so-called democracies, it seems that all wars are based and sold with official lies and fraudulent fabrications in order to fool the people. Warmongers in government know that people do not like wars, especially illegal wars of aggression, against countries which have not attacked them, and that is why their first reflex is to attempt to drag the people along with lies and false pretexts for war, and by dehumanizing any potential enemy through propaganda.
That is why I say that this 2013 sudden haste to bomb the country of Syria has all the appearances of a classical false flag operation to circumvent international law and perpetrate more killing in the name of unaware, uninformed or credulous ordinary Americans.
Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack H. Obama, —it does not matter who is president, any U.S. “Commander-in-Chief” can be expected to lie and use subterfuges to launch military attacks against other countries. —All of them have done so. As Noam Chomsky (1928-) said, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
In Washington D.C., political faces change but not the imperial hubris. American Vice President Joe Biden, for one, is today mimicking Dick Cheney, when he declares solemnly that “there is no doubt” that the Syrian government forces of Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons of mass destruction. So is Secretary John Kerry who says the evidence is “clear”. —Are these two politicians the new Dick Cheneys and the new Colin Powells, i.e. professional liars?
The Obama-Biden administration also claims that it has satellite pictures showing that missiles carrying chemical poison originated from Syrian controlled areas. Did we not learn that satellite intelligence can be most inaccurate? There is a civil war going on in Syria and there are numerous exchanges of missile attacks. How does one determine with certainty that one missile or one rocket rather than another one carries chemical poison?
We all remember when the Bush-Cheney administration claimed that it had satellite intelligence on the Iraq government of Saddam Hussein regarding its weapons of mass destruction program. They showed "satellite images of a chemical weapons factory." In fact, they were images of empty trailers in the desert!
We remember also the images of the famous aluminum “tubes” that Iraq was supposed to be using in centrifuges for uranium enrichment to build a nuclear weapon “within a year.” Following the American-led 2003 military invasion, no centrifuges, aluminum or otherwise, were found. It turned out that these were all lies to justify the planned aggression.
The fact is that you can have satellite pictures inerpreting anything that your fiction mind wants it to be.
There is a more logical explanation, certainly more logical than the official hogwash we have been served so far, about why a few foreign countries (essentially the U.S. and ...France!) want to intervene militarily in Syria, even if that means violating international law. (N.B.: So far, the British Parliament has succeeded in stopping David Cameron from doing so). There is indeed a logical reason why the Syrian rebels and some of the countries backing them could have resorted in desperation to a chemical attack against civilians.
The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad was on its way to winning its 2 1/2-year-old war against the rebels, some of whom are cannibalist terrorists, many originating from outside Syria. The Syrian national army had these Islamist terrorists on the run in the Damascus countryside and in the Eastern Ghouta.
This development created panic in the chancelleries of the main countries supporting the Syrian terrorists, i.e. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel, plus the United States, the U.K. and France, among others. Something had to be done to force the hand of a wavering U.S. President Barack Obama, a man whom Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu despises profoundly.
In the U.S., before the barrage of propaganda began in the media, a Reuters/Ipsos poll indicated that only 9 percent of the American people supported a bombing campaign against Syria. However, there is no doubt that with enough lies and enough propaganda, the Obama-Biden team can raise the public support for a military intervention in Syria.
As for the U.S. Congress, it has been demonstrated time and again, over the last thirty years, that Congress is neocon territory and so riddled with corruption that it is beyond hope. It's no surprise that the Obama-Biden administration, just like the Bush-Cheney administration, is asking these politicians for a blank check to bomb another foreign country. That's par for the imperial hubris.
There is little doubt that the U.S. Congress, led by the McCainiacs and other neocon warmongers, will give the Obama-Biden administration all the backing it wants for a unilateral military attack against the country of Syria. This will be in violation of international law and against the wishes of the American people. But who cares about the rule of law?
As U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-Moon has repeated, “the use of force is only legal when it is in self-defense or with a U.N. Security Council authorization". If the Obama administration does not want to abide by the U.N. Charter, it should leave the United Nations and join the club of rogue states.
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Saturday, July 6, 2013
Surveillance, Secrecy and Control in the Age of Big Brother
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
George Orwell (1903-1950)
(Eric Arthur Blair), English novelist, essayist, and social critic, (author of the book “1984”)
"I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."
Edward Snowden (1983- ), American patriot who revealed the Police State tactics of the U.S. government, (June 10, 2013)
“In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an ‘executive coup’ against the U.S. Constitution.”
Daniel Ellsberg (1931- )
American economist and military analyst. (In 1971, during the Richard Nixon administration, he released a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War)
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. By definition."
Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), (British reporter David Frost's interview with President Richard Nixon broadcast in May 1977)
Some American presidents reveal their true character only during their second terms. Without the obligation to campaign for a re-election and with leaks of past misbehavior, the mask of pretense falls and the person's true colors show. Then more inappropriate behavior and abuse of power follow and scandal tends to pile upon scandal. It happened to President Richard M. Nixon, also known as “tricky Dick”. It is now happening to President Barack H. Obama.
In the case of President Richard Nixon, his second term was mired by a series of events surrounding the Watergate Scandal and other allegations of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of his 1972 re-election. On October 20, 1973, Nixon used strong-armed tactics to have Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal and White House cover-ups, fired. Soon afterwards, impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives began, resulting in President Nixon's resignation less than one year later, on August 9, 1974.
President Barack Obama has begun his second term with a series of scandals. Just a few months after his re-election, instances of abuse of power began to surface at a fast pace. The most serious scandal is the revelation that the U.S. government is involved in warrantless surveillance, keeping track of telephone calls and Internet emails of Americans, including those of journalists and reporters.
This revelation, in addition to the fact that the Obama administration has had the IRS targeting conservative groups—a throw-back to the Nixon administration targeting the income tax returns of Nixon's “enemies”—is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure, and of theFirst Amendment that prohibits the making of any law ... infringing on the freedom of the press.
It is very difficult for a police state-to-be to be respectful of the country's constitution, because when a government gives itself the power to access private financial, medical, consumer sales records like book purchases, besides Toll records, phone calls and Internet communications and searches, without the consent of the law abiding individuals concerned and with no court order, it nearly automatically attacks the democratic rights of privacy of the people. When government officials secretly snoop on citizens and begin infringing on individual freedom and privacy, the worm is in the apple.
A country cannot be a totalitarian state and a democratic state at the same time. —It has to choose one way or the other. I would add that it cannot be both a military empire and a democratic republic, either. That is because an empire requires a high degree of centralization of power and information, while a democracy needs a decentralization of power and information. Historically, when a country became imperialistic and militaristic, like Germany in the 1930s, it also ceases being democratic even if for a while it keeps the trappings of democracy.
What is troubling in the case of the Obama administration and in the case of the preceding Bush administration is the admission by surveillance officials that they were proceeding according to “secret laws” or “secret interpretations of laws”, that they were alone judge and jury.
During the Nixon impeachment hearings, much was made about the crucial distinction between a “government of men” vs. a “government of laws“. If men in power can do whatever they want, irrespective of due process, the country is not a democracy. It may be a royalty, an empire or a dictatorship, but it is not a democratic republic.
There would not be a new debate about these issues if some people had not stepped forward to provide information about what those men were doing in secrecy. Indeed, in June 2013, a young American named Edward Snowden, who can only be considered a true patriot since he has the U.S. Constitution on his side, rendered a tremendous service to his fellow Americans and to humanity in revealing the Police State tactics used by the U.S. government to follow the private whereabouts of law abiding citizens. For this courageous and deserving act, Edward Snowden should probably be awarded the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, if that distinction has any meaning after a committee of Norwegian politicians wrongfully awarded it, in 2009, to Barack Hussein Obama who hardly deserved it, having done nothing to promote peace and freedom besides uttering vague pronouncements, and having instead increased drone killings of innocent people around the world.
What we must realize, indeed, is that the government, politicians and bureaucrats never have enough information on the citizens they are supposed to serve, and they can be expected to use all the available techniques to obtain it.
Freedom and individual liberty are always threatened by governments that have force on their side, all the more so when the technology becomes available to watch individuals and would-be government critics, blackmail them, intimidate them and reduce them to silence and, ultimately, to de facto silent and docile robots. A truly respectable statesman would refrain from such practice, but ordinary politicians and their entourage can be expected to place the government agenda front and center and their personal interests and those of their allies above the common good.
Indeed, while it is true that the moral ground of any administration is set by whoever is president at the time, it is his entourage, the permanent as well as the transient bureaucracy that wishes to extend its power to the limit. In any government, there will always be a John Yoo or a Kenneth Wainstein who will justify extending the Police State embrace to its utmost. There will always be a sycophant within the administration who is going to write a “legal” memo to justify torture, to install a warrantless snooping system on the private lives of individuals or to justify launching an illegal war of aggression against another country. That is to be expected.
That is why the character of the people we elect to the highest office is of paramount importance, because they choose what type of people will run the government. They even choose who sits on the Supreme Court. When people realize that they have been duped, it is usually too late. The damage is already done. The only recourse, when available, is to initiate costly impeachment proceedings.
Now, thanks to Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald, we know that the U.S. government, and the governments of four other “democratic” countries (the so-called “second-party partners”: U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have amassed tons of electronic information on the private lives of every citizen in their country, without the knowledge of the people themselves, thus opening the door to blackmail, intimidation, repression and any other abuse you can imagine. With a code and a name, they can zoom in on one individual and know everything about him or her. And you can be sure that once that information has been collected, the circle of those who will have access to such private information will get wider and wider. —Frightening stuff indeed.
And don't expect to get the truth from government officials, since the U.S. Director of National Intelligence apparatus, James Clapper, has admitted that he had given U.S. Senators “the least untruthful answer possible” during a hearing on the issue of secret warrantless surveillance of Americans. If U.S. Senators are lied to, imagine the fate of the ordinary citizen! For instance, officials or politicians will tell you that such and such illegal program has been stopped, without telling you that it is continuing under a new name.
What is scary is not only the lying and the illegality, but the Gestapo-like tactics of character assassination that supporters of the Police State launch against those who only followed their duty and conscience in revealing the secret unlawful attacks against the people's constitutional rights. This is a pattern that one finds in a totalitarian state, not in a true democracy, and it is another indication that the political and moral decay runs deep in the American society, especially in the nomenklatura of the U.S. military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us against some fifty years ago.
Not surprisingly, the revelation about the extent of the Obama administration's secret surveillance program on Americans has resulted in Barack Obama dropping in the polls and has spurred demands for his impeachment—and this only six months after his re-election. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Nixon era. It would be ironic if the first black American president goes down in history as the new Nixon!
We thought the Internet would liberate people. Little did we know it is turning into an instrument of tyranny in the hands of “Big Brother” government! “Big Brother” has found a way to open your emails and keep records of people you have contacted and who have communicated with you and who have communicated with other individuals that you don't even know. With the knowledge of these so-called contact chains, “Big Brother” is now in a position to know more about you than you do yourself!
The sad truth is that we increasingly live in a managed democracy where elections are rigged, where propaganda is rampant and where a money aristocracy runs most of everything, using old-fashioned Soviet-style techniques of control and propaganda. In the U.S., when the huge Utah data gathering center that the government is building is completed, the government will have all the information it wants on any individual, and things will likely get much worse. This is because a global militaristic empire naturally needs a worldwide net of information on people. That is why also it must keep enlarging its global electronic espionage programs.
One totalitarian state disappears; another quickly takes its place. Maybe President Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that “every generation needs a new revolution.”
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Friday, June 14, 2013
The Real Obama's Bent on Killing Innocent People with Remote-controlled Drones
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.”
Will Rogers (1879-1935)
American cowboy, vaudeville performer, humorist, social commentator and motion picture actor
[Afghan parents] “have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties caused by American military operations.”
Gen. Davis H. Petraeus,
top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, February 20, 2011, (report of a meeting at President Hamid Karzai's presidential palace)
“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.“
Pres. Barack Obama,
speech in San Jose, Ca, (June 7, 2013)
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”
Abraham Lincoln (1809—1865)
16th President of the United States (1861-65)
When Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, there was hope that the newly reelected president would show his true colors during his second term, not having to run again and having nothing to lose by being himself. I, for one, hoped that the Real Obama, the 2008 Obama of “Yes we Can”, would liberate himself from the Washington-centered military-industrial complex and show some character and principles, and reverse some of the most dangerous policies that the Bush-Cheney administration had set in motion. Also, there was hope that Barack Obama, as American President, would establish some distance between his administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who had openly campaigned for Mitt Romney and against him during the election, a fact that earned Netanyahu the title of “Republican representative from the state of Israel.”
Granted that President Obama, on paper at least, is much less a loose cannon than would have been a John McCain or a Mitt Romney in the presidency, both of whom sometimes gave the impression of being little more than neocon puppets. But expectations were that Barack Obama would be much more than a slightly improved version of his radical opponents of 2008 and 2012. Instead, evidence indicates that Barack Obama went the other way and is actively competing with Richard Nixon and George W. Bush to become a secretive and warmongering president.
It would seem that Barack Obama has gone native, i.e. he has embraced the Washington nomenklatura's agenda with enthusiasm in restraining civil liberties and in promoting global warfare in the quest of an Imperial America. In particular, he has increased the killing of innocent people, often innocent children, around the world with the crude instruments of state terror and killing machines called military unmanned “drones”.
Keep in mind that such instruments of terror were invented in the 1980s by an Israeli national, Abraham Karem, then chief designer for the Israeli airforce, and who migrated to California to pursue his activities. Initially used for surveillance only, advances in information and computer technology have made possible the building of military killing drones, to the delight of the companies that build them – mainly American and Israeli – which have raked in gorgeous profits for their contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon.
Indeed, the sophisticated remote control technology, using satellite communications for targeted killing has been progressing very fast since the CIA and the U.S. Air Force deployed the first weaponized unmanned drones after 2001. The first military drone was the Predator, manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, a division of General Atomicsheadquartered in San Diego, CA. The same company developed a larger version called the Reaper, capable of launching Hellfire missiles at their human “prey”. The newest model is the Avenger, and no doubt that many other versions will be profitably developed. —This technology has made remote killing easy, like a video game that isolates the killer from his victim.
The moral dimension of this new kind of brutality detached from humanity has not yet been fully appreciated. Just as it was immoral for American President Harry Truman to order the drop of nuclear bombs on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, in 1945, it is immoral for President Barack Obama to authorize targeted assassinations around the world.
Such remote-controlled weaponized drones, telecommanded from Nevada, for example, can fire missiles at the houses of foreign nationals in the tribal areas of Pakistan and in other countries, but they often miss their intended targets and they hit peasant homes and other private facilities and kill innocent civilians. Many consider such acts of aggression as state terrorism on a large scale.
Obama has even usurped the unilateral power of killing American citizens with drones without due process. No other American president has ever claimed to have such a poweroutside of the U.S. Constitution.
All this has made observers reassess Obama’s character and agenda. Just as George W. Bush was less than candid in making public the moral and legal justifications for introducing torture in the U.S. military culture, a huge step backward, Barack Obama has been opaque on the moral, legal and constitutional basis for his killing program abroad. In Bush’s case, the shaky legal advice to “justify” torture came from an unknown lawyer of Korean origin, John Yoo whose torture memos were made public for evaluation.
In Obama’s case, to routinely engage in targeting suspected nameless militants for assassination in foreign countries with which the U.S. is not at war, his administration has argued that the legal advice offered to the president is confidential and secret. —This is not a trivial matter. So far, it has been estimated that the United States has killed 4,700 people abroad with drone strikes, outside of declared war zones. The Obama administration has dramatically expanded the use of killing drones abroad. For example, the Obama administration has increased by 600 percentthe drone strikes that the Bush-Cheney administration had initiated, and this for strikes in Pakistan alone.
At least with Bush II, people knew who gave the advice and the nature of such advice. With Obama, everybody is in the dark, including even members of Congressional intelligence committees, let alone Joe public. The irony comes from the fact that candidate Barack Obama, in 2008, was a fierce critic of George W. Bush’s national security policies, notably regarding his approval of interrogation practices widely seen as torture. Now, all that has emerged to justify targeted assassinations is an anonymous 16-page document flatly stating that the President has such an authority. If this is not the sign of an imperial presidency, what is? That is why some have begun referring to Obama as Dictator Obama.
The European Parliament has recently issued a statementquestioning the Obama administration’s refusal to divulge the legal and moral basis for its targeted killing program abroad:
“We are deeply concerned about the legal basis, as well as the moral, ethical and human rights implications of the United States' targeted killing programme that authorises the CIA and the military to hunt and kill individuals who have suspected links to terrorism anywhere in the world.“
In conclusion, let us say that the Obama administration should be leading international efforts to outlaw the widespread use of weaponized unmanned drones, just as gas warfare and nuclear warfare have been outlawed. Sadly, President Barack Obama is rather promoting their use, making the world an even more dangerous place. Such weapons, like nuclear bombs, are bound to spread and what's good for the goose may also be good for the gander. These weapons could come to haunt the U.S. itself in the future. They don't increase U.S. security in the long run. They rather reduce it. —Nobody should have the right to kill just anybody, anywhere in the world. This is the stuff of tyranny.
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Wednesday, March 20, 2013
The Iraq War Fiasco, Ten Years Later
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
"International law? I better call my lawyer; he didn't bring that up to me."
George W. Bush (1946- ), U.S. president (2001-2009), (December 12, 2003)
"I told George Bush as early as August 2002, during a meeting in Detroit, that we would support him if he receives the authorization from the UN. —I told him: 'To have the backing of the U.N., it will be necessary that you establish more clearly that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction.' —There was no such evidence. Since he [George W. Bush] did not provide sufficient evidence, he did not get the support of the U.N. ... Without an authorization from the United Nations, Canada must stay away from military interventions abroad, even if they are carried out by its allies. "
Jean Chrétien (1934- ), Prime Minister of Canada (1993-2003), (March 13, 2013)
“Those who were 100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq, before the March 2003 invasion] had less than zero percent knowledge.”
Hans Blix (1928- ), former chief United Nations weapons inspector, August 2010
“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Alan Greenspan (1926- ), former Federal Reserve Chairman (in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World”, 2007)
“He who wants to kill his dog accuses him of having rabies.”
Old French saying
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the decision by the Bush-Cheney administration to invade the country of Iraq and initiate what can be called a war of choice. This is a good time to briefly look back at this unsavory historical episode.
Public opinion polls indicate that a majority of Americans now think the 2003 Iraq war, in which tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans died, was a mistake. In the UK., the other country most involved with the Iraq war, a similar polltaken recently indicates that only 28 percent of Brits now believe the war was justified and made the world a safer place.
Other polls also indicate that George W.Bush has a good chance to be considered, if not the worst, certainly among the worst presidents the United States ever had. The man had no moral compass.
Indeed, his personal and unilateral decision to launch an illegal war of aggression in 2003—against Iraq, a country that had not attacked the United States—based on disingenuous lies, fabrications, disinformation and propaganda, and in violation of the United Nations' Charter, whose Security Council refused to authorize the American aggression, will go down in history as one of those abuses and pretexts that devious politicians resort to when they want to circumvent international law in order to promote some narrow personal or national interests.
But Iraq had a lot of oil, and it was considered in certain circles an enemy of Israel, a country that the current generation of American politicians supports blindly. That was enough to want to topple its government and take control of it.
In the summer and fall of 2002, distressed by what I considered nothing less than a neocon cabal and a series of outrageous lies by the Bush-Cheney administration, I began writing a book denouncing the coming war of aggression against Iraq.
The book was initially published in French six weeks before the March 20, 2003 military assault against Iraq under the title “Why Bush Wants War” (“Pourquoi Bush veut la guerre”), a book presently out of print (now a collector's item). It was published one year later, this time in English, under the title of “The New American Empire”, and, a few years later, was published in Europe under the title of “Le nouvel empire américain” and was also translated into Turkish under the title “Yeni Amerikan ImperatorLugu”.
The book described the type of cabal and aggressive war campaign in the Bush-Cheney administration and in many American media to push the United States toward an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East in order to overthrow Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime and to exert an overt influence in the way that country uses its natural resources.
Indeed, the 2003 American war against Iraq was primarily an economic war, because the government of Saddam Hussein was excluding U.S. and U.K. companies from Iraqi oil resource development. This was in retaliation for these two countries supporting unconditionally Israel's decades-long oppression of the Palestinians. As a consequence, the Bush-Cheney administration and its vassal Tony Blair in England felt that they had to intervene militarily in order to prevent French, German, Russian, and Chinese oil companies to develop Iraq's oil, while U.S. and U.K. oil company interests were excluded. Basic economic interests were thus at play and international law was powerless to stop the military onslaught.
The pretext found was to accuse Iraq to harbor “weapons of mass destruction” that it could possibly and eventually use against its neighbors. Such so-called “weapons of mass destruction” were never found because they never existed in the first place, as the Hans Blix U.N. inspecting commission had publicly certified. The entire propaganda operation by the Bush-Cheney administration was nothing more than a lie and a fraud.
Mind you, the 2003 Iraq war was triggered by the Bush-Cheney administration after the United States was already involved in a protracted war against Al Qaeda fundamentalist conservatism in Afghanistan, and this since the fall of 2001 under a United Nations' authorization and in retaliation for this latter country Taliban government's support for the 9/11 terrorists.
Another oft-repeated lie by the Bush-Cheney administration was that the government of Iraq had been involved, one way or another, in the 9/11 attack. Not a thread of evidence has ever been produced to that effect, while all indications were to the contrary that secular Saddam Hussein was vehemently opposed to the religiously-bent Al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.
The American people and a majority in Congress would probably not have supported the Iraq military invasion had there not have been a barrage of propaganda that originated from the pro-Israel Lobby in the media and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Libby-Perle cabal inside the U.S. government. These two campaigns had a tremendous impact in persuading a passive public still shaken by the 9/11 terrorist attacks that the lies it was fed were facts.
We pretend to live in countries of laws and not of men and that nobody is above the law. This can be disputed, however, in light of the fact that no one in the Bush-Cheney regime in the U.S. and in the Tony Blair regime in the U.K. has been held accountable to date for this massive abuse of power, a prima facie impeachable offense. Instead, most of the actors in this tragedy have been rewarded with plush nominations.
The U.S. military officially withdrew from Iraq in 2011, but that country is still in a mess and it will suffer economically and politically for decades to come the destruction and destabilization it has been subjected to by the 2003 U.S.-led military invasion.
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Thursday, March 7, 2013
A More Than Questionable Bernanke Fed Monetary Policy
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd US President
"It is well enough that people ... do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Henry Ford (1863-1947), American automobile industrialist
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Bernanke Fed's monetary policy of fixing short-term interest rates at close to zero percent, and (with inflation at two percent or so) of forcing negative real interest rates, was primarily designed not to help the U.S. economy but to shore up the super large American banksthat were on the verge of bankruptcy when the investment bank Lehman Brothers failed on September 15, 2008. Indeed, with this policy, the Bernanke Fed has transferred hundreds of billions to these super banks at a huge cost to the rest of the economy and to international holders of U.S. dollars.
Just as the Greenspan Fed created the housing bubble and let the derivatives market explode, thus sowing the seeds of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Bernanke Fed, using faulty economic analysis, has embarked upon a policy of zero short-term interest rates for many years, —an open-ended QE3 policy of buying mortgages and other financial instruments with newly printed money, thus creating the largest bond bubble in U.S. history.
When the distortions it has created in the U.S. economy unfolds in the coming years, the true costs of this policy will become clearer. Indeed, when the Fed tries to unload the financial assets it has acquired from the near-insolvent super large American banks, in a not too distant future, bond prices will be in danger of collapsing and nominal interest rates could spike, with a very negative impact on financial markets and on the real economy.
Economists know that price controls and price fixing do not work, at least, not for very long. Credit markets are not immune to this economic reality. In any market, for any good or service, when prices are fixed by a government or a government agency below the market clearing price, sooner or later a gap develops between the excess quantity demanded and the insufficient quantity offered.
The classical example of resource misallocation is rent controlimplemented in some cities and in some countries. The inevitable result of such a policy is eventually the appearance of a shortage of rental units and a deterioration in the quality of those still offered. In fact, if any given government wishes to create housing slums and a housing shortage, it can just impose stringent rent controls on a permanent basis. This does not mean that housing cannot be subsidized. But freezing prices is generally not an efficient way to subsidize housing or any other commodity or service.
Now. What happens when the Fed artificially sets the short-term interest rate at close to zero for a long period? A long series of negative economic repercussions follow.
-First, large banks which have access to Fed loans at this artificially low rate will borrow as much of that newly created money as they can and they will lend risk-free to the deficit-laden government at two or three percent. Nice trade if you can get it!
-Second, the demand for bank loans will go up with the banks' prime borrowing rate artificially low. However, banks will increase their borrowing requirements for private borrowers since they can invest their excess reserves risk-free, either at the Fed itself, albeit a low rate, or by lending to the government at a higher rate. Private borrowers will be frustrated and valuable projects may remain under-financed, while the government has little incentive to curb its deficit.
-Third, banks and their preferential clients will use part of their excess reserves obtained at close to zero percent to buy financial assets. Stock prices and bond prices will go up.
-Fourth, other investors such as insurance companies and pension funds, with the knowledge that the Fed will keep short-term rates low for an extended period of time, will buy staggered long-term bonds and keep their prices artificially high, when one considers the inflation risk and the time risk involved.
-Fifth, with borrowing rates so low for so long, some financial operators will begin buying up companies with leveraged money, thus placing finance ahead of industry.
—All of this translates into negative economic and financial distorsions in the long run.
Maybe that's the reason the Bernanke Fed seems so popular on Wall Street. It has been a powerful tool for asset reflation. I even personally heard a financial commentator on the CNBC financial TV network declare that Ben Bernanke was the “best Fed chairman, ever” because he was being credited for a stock market rally!
Such is not the consensus among economists and on Main Street, where savers and retirees on fixed income have seen their revenues collapse over the last five years. That reminds me how Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was venerated on Wall Street, that is, until it became clear that his policy of low interest rates, easy money, junk mortgages and inadequate banking regulation brought down the financial house of cards. In economics, there is no magic, and the piper has to be paid sooner or later!
I don't know if it is because of the fact that the American central bank and its federal banking system is partly owned by large private banks, or because there are so many bankers who sit on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), (the committe that sets interest rates) and who are in conflict of interest, but the Fed has a recurring and nagging tendency to create financial bubbles and economic booms and busts that end up—more often than not—benefiting large banks and their CEOs, at a huge cost to the real economy. The Fed is really an institution primarily designed to subsidize large banks with public money.
The American government itself subsidized the large banks with its $700 billion TARP program. We agree that the Fed had to intervene during the financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers, whatever its role in creating that crisis.However, did it have an obligation to keep subsidizing the super large banks for five years or more and dump the cost on the rest of the economy while imposing very little restraint on their lax behavior? I don't think so.
The Fed cannot argue that without such a prolonged subsidy policy, the economic recovery after the 2008-2009 recession would have been thwarted. In fact, this has been the slowest recovery from a recession since WWII. And the Bernanke Fed should share some responsibility for that.
But now that the Bernanke Fed has dug itself into a monetary hole, it should be extra prudent and careful in reversing course, less it precipitate the U.S. economy into another recession.
People have suffered enough in losing their jobs and, for many, their homes, and for many retirees, the income from their savings, without again being the Fed's victims.
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Thursday, February 7, 2013
The U.S. Congress: From One Crisis to Another
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“The full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. . . Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets."
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), 40th President of the United States (1981–89), (1983)
“Decisions about the debt level [should] occur in conjunction with spending and revenue decisions as opposed to the after-the-fact approach now used, ... [doing so] would help avoid the uncertainty and disruptions that occur during debates on the debt limit today.”
U.S. Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.)
"I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether they should pay the bills for what they've racked up. ... We can't not pay bills that we've already incurred."
President Barack Obama, Tuesday January 1, 2013
"That’s why the American people hate Congress."
Chris Christie, New Jersey Republican Governor, (January 2, 2013, after the Republican House majority refused to vote on a $60 billion aid package for victims of Superstorm Sandy)
One crisis averted, three to come! Indeed, that's what can be said after the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on January 23, 2013, to suspend the government’s statutory borrowing limit for three months.
In fact, the cycle of artificially created crises will go on and on in Washington D.C. Now, the next crises are scheduled for March 1s, for March 27th and for May 19th. Stay tuned. —On March 1st, automatic sequester cuts agreed by Congress in 2012 will take effect, causing an immediate cut of $69 billion in public discretionary spending. Then, on March 27, the U.S. government's ability to fund itself (the "continuing resolution") will run out. And, of course, come May 19, the melodrama of raising the debt ceiling will be back again in force.
Ever since Republicans took control of the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives in 2010, a fiscal drama with the White House and the U.S. Senate has been replayed time and again. One of the political gimmick is called the “raising of the country's debt limit.”
Why so many artificial crises in the current American political system? Extreme political polarization seems to be the answer.
Indeed, since the 2010 mid-term election, when the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives with some 242 seats, this party has behaved as if it were in fact two parties in one. There is the traditional conservative Republican Party on one side, and the radical Republican Tea Party on the other side. With some 67anarchist anti-tax and anti-establishment Tea Party House members voting as a block, the latter has been in a position to hold the balance of power in the House and to prevent compromised solutions to the country’s fiscal problems.
A good example was the 2011 showdown between the Democratic Obama administration and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives regarding raising the U.S. government’s debt ceiling.
In the spring of 2011, House Republicans, spurred by Tea Party members who practice no party discipline toward the Republican Party except to themselves, and reneging on a decades-long bipartisan tradition, refused to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, thus threatening to push the U.S. government toward debt default. They demanded that the Obama administration concede to freezing tax revenues and to enacting massive spending cuts. In the midst of a financial crisis and an economic slowdown, such huge public spending cuts could have pushed the U.S. economy toward an economic depression similar to the 1930’s Great Depression.
For the first time, therefore, House Tea Party members decided to use the perfunctory requirement to raise the debt limit to gain partisan political advantage. That move has introduced into the functioning of the U.S. Congress an element of radicalism and brinkmanship that could prevent the U.S. government from operating properly for years to come.
Mind you, the obligation for Congress to vote on raising the U.S. government’s debt ceiling has existed since a 1917 law to that effect was enacted. It allows the U.S. Treasury to proceed with borrowing to finance government operations as outlined in an already approved budget for a given fiscal year.
Economically speaking, indeed, there are three main ways to finance public expenditures: -through tax revenues; -through borrowing; -or, through the printing press, when a government borrows from its own central bank. The latter is in fact an inflation tax imposed on every user of the national currency.
Therefore, if the U.S. Congress has already approved a public budget of operations that does not raise taxes in a sufficient amount to cover outlays, and if an inflation tax is out of question, the only other avenue left is to borrow the required funds.
For years, the 1917 requirement to raise the debt limit was considered redundant since the budget had already been approved and it was seen as a simple bipartisan formality. Since 1940, for example, the U.S. debt ceiling has been raised 94 times, 54 times by a Republican administration and 40 times by a Democratic administration. Altogether the debt ceiling has been raised 102 times since 1917. It has been raised every year that the U.S. government has run a deficit.
If the Tea Party members of the House keep on routinely using the 1917 law to formally raise the debt limit as an obstructionist tool, Congress may be constantly gridlocked and the U.S. government will continue going from crisis to crisis. A small minority of House members could then hold the U.S. government hostage. As a consequence, it could become increasingly difficult for the U.S. Administration to implement sensible economic and fiscal policies along the principle of majority rule. The U.S. economy is bound to suffer severely from such a political paralysis.
In 2011, former president Bill Clinton expressed the view that the 1917 law is unconstitutional since it goes against Article I, sec. 8 of the U.S. Constitution that requires that Congress pay “the Debts and provide for the ... general Welfare of the United States.” Besides, the Fourteenth Amendment (section 4) of the U.S. Constitution states that: "the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned.”
Therefore, if Congress does not fulfill its duties for one reason or another, the President in whom executive power is vested may have the right to act for the “general Welfare of the United States”.
In the coming weeks, if the House of Representatives refuses bipartisan cooperation and keeps stonewalling the Administration, President Obama may have no other choice but to call the Tea Party members’ bluff by unilaterally declaring the 1917 law unconstitutional and letting the courts sort it out later.
A constitutional crisis may seem to many to be a better alternative than a repetitive and protracted economic and financial crisis and an economy constantly teetering on the brink of a permanent “fiscal cliff”.
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