In September of 2000, at the height of the Presidential election campaign, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) released a report entitled, Rebuilding America's Defenses. PNAC was comprised of the major neoconservatives including Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, William Kristol, John Bolton and Richard Perle. They were not interested in letting the end of the Cold War slow down America's military buildup.

At present the United States faces no global rival. America's grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible...At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals.The challenge for the coming century is to preserve and enhance this “American peace.”

Underlying the failed strategic and defense reviews of the past decade is the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union had created a "strategic pause." In other words, until another great power challenger emerges, the United States can enjoy a respite from the demands of international leadership. Like a boxer between championship bouts, America can afford to relax and live the good life, certain that there would be enough time to shape up for the next big challenge. Thus the United States could afford to reduce its military forces, close bases overseas, halt major weapons programs and reap the financial benefits of the "peace dividend." But as we have seen over the past decade, there has been no shortage of powers around the world who have taken the collapse of the Soviet empire as an opportunity to expand their own influence and challenge the American-led security order.

In sum, the 1990s have been a “decade of defense neglect.” This leaves the next president of the United States with an enormous challenge: he must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership, or he must pull back from the security commitments that are the measure of America’s position as the world’s sole superpower and the final guarantee of security, democratic freedoms and individual political rights.

This is the "Pax Americana"-- laid out in stark terms. Four months later, the authors of this document took over the National Security Strategy of the United States and immediately began to implement the "American Peace". Their formula was based around four core missions.

• defend the American homeland;
• fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
• perform the "constabulary" duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;
• transform U.S. forces to exploit the "revolution in military affairs;"
  

As clear as their vision was for the future of American force projection, the neoconservatives were not unrealistic about the power of domestic politics to slow down their transformational strategy. The first year of the Bush Administration met with considerable resistance both inside and outside the Pentagon to the strategy of "The Vulcans" , as Wolfowitz and Feith's team were called. Buried deep on page 63 of the 90 page PNAC document was an acknowledgement of the need for a catalyst.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

Conspiracy theorists have seized upon these two lines to show that Cheney and his teams knew that 9/11 was being planned and they let it happen to provide the catalyst. But it is not necessary to buy into this line of thinking to understand that the planning to overthrow Saddam Hussein had been in Wolfowitz's head since probably 1976. Because they had studied Leo Strauss, Walter Lippman and the "manufacturing of consent", they were well prepared to use the public's hysterical reaction to 9/11 to move the country behind the Iraq War. Our task here is not to review the propaganda mission of the Bush Regime or its egregious strategic blunders, but rather now to turn to the economic effects of a $2 trillion "war of choice". The reality of Bush's huge military buildup began to put more stresses on the debt markets.

Fourteen months after the 9/11 attacks, Ben Bernanke, then a Fed Governor, gave a speech to the National Economists Club in Washington entitled, "Deflation: Making Sure "It" Doesn't Happen Here". The combined shocks of the Dot Com crash and 9/11 had drastically weakened demand and the Fed had studied the ten year Japanese battle with deflation as a cautionary tale. Bernanke, also a student of the punishing deflation of our Great Depression, was genuinely worried that corporations were losing all pricing power. Bernanke laid out the dangers of deflation.

Suppose that deflation is proceeding at a clip of 10 percent per year. Then someone who borrows for a year at a nominal interest rate of zero actually faces a 10 percent real cost of funds, as the loan must be repaid in dollars whose purchasing power is 10 percent greater than that of the dollars borrowed originally. In a period of sufficiently severe deflation, the real cost of borrowing becomes prohibitive. Capital investment, purchases of new homes, and other types of spending decline accordingly, worsening the economic downturn.

For Bernanke, this situation was a central banker's worse nightmare, and he urged the Fed to get out ahead of this disaster by drastically cutting rates. His boss Alan Greenspan bought into the argument. Although rates were already historically low, the Fed continued to cut, ending at a 1% Fed Funds rate in June of 2003. As James Grant pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, this deliberate "reflation" of the economy had a number of effects.

The central bank pushed the interest rate it controls, the so-called federal funds rate, all the way down to 1% and held it there for the 12 months ended June 2004. House prices levitated as mortgage underwriting standards collapsed. The credit markets went into speculative orbit, and an idea took hold. Risk, the bankers and brokers and professional investors decided, was yesteryear's problem.

The historically low rates in 2003 and 2004 were also very helpful for George Bush in that they made financing the Iraq War relatively cheap by historical standards. On May 15, 2003, The New York Times noted that the 10 Year T Bill had fallen to a 45 year low yield of only 3.52%. But as the war moved into its second full year and the Treasury borrowing continued to mount the once mighty dollar began to fall. From an economic point of view it was first noticed in the oil market as Mid East oil traders kept raising prices to make up for the dollar's fall. As 2005 began the fall of the dollar accelerated. Warren Buffet disclosed he had a major short position in the dollar on global currency markets and the price of oil continued its relentless climb, especially if you were buying it with dollars. The continuing fall of the global reserve currency posed an especially tricky problem for the governments of China, Japan, Korea and Saudi Arabia. They were all selling a huge amount of goods and commodities to the U.S. and thus were taking in far more dollars than they needed for domestic uses. The Chinese and the Saudis were essentially pegging their own currencies to the dollar in order to keep prices stable and U.S. demand strong. But as the value of their dollar reserves was being marked down on a daily basis, they began to contemplate spreading their reserve holdings into Euros.  But they were caught in a trap. If they sold a lot of dollars their remaining reserves would plummet, U.S. interest rates would rise rapidly and a global recession might start, thereby harming their export industries. All through 2006 they tried to avoid this problem, but by mid 2007, they had no choice. This relatively benign diversification of risk on the part of sovereign wealth funds could have easily been absorbed in a global market with oceans of liquidity, except for one problem. The four year long housing bubble was rapidly deflating.

The world financial markets might have been able to handle the effect of yet a second bubble bursting in 6 years except for the fact that most Wall Street firms had been more profligate in their borrowing than their hapless sub-prime mortgage holders. As James Grant explains, they were leveraged to the gills.

For every dollar of equity capital, a well-financed regional bank holds perhaps $10 in loans or securities. Wall Street's biggest broker-dealers could hardly bear to look themselves in the mirror if they didn't extend themselves three times further. At the end of 2007, Goldman Sachs had $26 of assets for every dollar of equity. Merrill Lynch had $32, Bear Stearns $34, Morgan Stanley $33 and Lehman Brothers $31. On average, then, about $3 in equity capital per $100 of assets. "Leverage," as the laying-on of debt is known in the trade, is the Hamburger Helper of finance. It makes a little capital go a long way, often much farther than it safely should. Managing balance sheets as highly leveraged as Wall Street's requires a keen eye and superb judgment. The rub is that human beings err.

So we had the perfect storm: A U.S. Government needing to borrow $50 billion a month; a banking system needing to replace perhaps $1.2 trillion in capital losses;rapidly rising delinquencies in consumer mortgages, credit cards and auto loans. This could not end well.

The British economist Baron Robbins wrote that "economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." In a sense, politics is the process by which we decide which alternatives we will dedicate our "means" to. Dick Cheney's idea of a "Pax Americana" has brought us to this perfect storm. The chart on the left, of the 2007 discretionary budget, could not make our priorities more clear. In an era of global liquidity and easy money, we might, like the condo-flipper of 2006, have been able to avoid the hard choices between guns and butter. But the next two years and beyond will not afford us that luxury. As our country's most important bond manager, Bill Gross has pointed out, the only exit strategy from our current economic nightmare is an old fashioned Keynesian stimulus plan.

To provide a stable recovery path, government spending needs to fill the gap – not consumption. Public works programs, badly needed infrastructure repairs, as well as spending on research and development projects should form the heart of our path to recovery.

But that stimulus will not be possible as long as the Military continues to hog 56% of our discretionary budget. Yesterday in Jordan, Barack Obama noted that the President must make hard choices that go beyond the responsibility of regional military commanders, including,

“what’s adequate for our security interests, factoring in the fact that not only do we have Afghanistan, which I believe is the central front on terror, but also the fact that if we’re spending $10 billion a month over the next two, four, five years, then that’s $10 billion a month that we’re not using to rebuild the United States."

This is a start in the right direction, but the ultimate question of where the source of America's power resides is yet to be addressed in the current Presidential campaign. The answer for the neoconservatives that make up John McCain's National Security brain trust are clear. They all were members of the Project for the New American Century and the "constabulary duties" they see for American forces are endless. But a new vision of American power that resides in its economic, cultural and technological power has yet to be clearly defined by the Democrats. Perhaps a Presidential campaign is not the place to introduce America to the notion that spending more on the military than all our rivals and allies combined is folly. But at some point in the not too distant future this is a conversation we must have. I say this not because of some idealistic notion of peace, but rather from the hard bitten realism that comes to anyone who circulates in the world's capitals. We are engaged in a global commercial competition of such scale that unless we are able to rebuild our schools, our health care system, our energy system, our transportation and digital networks we will surely become a second class power.

In 1997 the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers wrote,

The United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of Great Powers, of what might be called 'imperial overstretch': that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the total of the United States's global interests and obligations is nowadays far too large for the country to be able to defend them all simultaneously.

Saying this less than eight years after the fall of communism brought ridicule from the Conservatives then planning their return to power. How ironic that a mere ten years later it all came true. But this story does not have to end like some sad tale of Nero-like decadence at the fall of Rome. Those of us that have spent our life in business know that "creative destuction" can unleash the powers of imagination. It will be our task to imagine a way to free our country from the grip of a permanent war economy.

It will not be easy, but it must be done.

The source -- a man who would only relay the information in an underground parking garage in Washington, D.C. -- said that something sinister is stirring again underneath the visible surface of the U.S. government.

"They've done it before," the man said cryptically while smoking a cigarette in the shadows. "They banged a gong in 2001 and lit Lady Liberty on fire to get us into the Middle East. They're ready to do it again."

The man explained that a powerful and invisible faction of government wants to extend America's power base in the Middle East into oil-rich Iran.

"It's the power station strategy," he said. "Use power to station troops where all the oil is in order to achieve global dominance and empire. You need to realize that this secret beast doesn't care how much money or how many lives it flushes down the toilet to get what it wants; and the teeth of this Hydra has a tight grip on the country."

When it was pointed out to him that the U.S. seems to have chosen diplomacy to deal with Iran and its controversial nuclear program, he scoffed at the notion.

"They don't plan to cancel the attack on Iran," the insider explained before receding into the shadows. "It's just a matter of time before they bang a gong and get it on."

The mysterious man refused to explain further, but said before leaving that there are present and past clues everywhere, if one is observant.

(Photo by Badagnani, Wikipedia)

Asked if he thought troops in Iraq might be coming home soon, GOP presumptive nominee John McCain changed the subject. He said he doesn't want them home. He wants them stationed in the Middle East just as American troops have been stationed in South Korea, Japan, and Europe for decades.

Follow this link to the original source: "Democrats Criticize McCain on Strategy in Iraq [1]"

COMMENTARY:

Interviewed on NBC’s Today show, John McCain was asked if the troop "surge" he has long advocated was successful enough to predict when the troops in Iraq might be returning home. He immediately said he didn't have a prediction, and then added, "but that's not important." And he clearly indicated his desire to see only a reduction in casualties, not a reduction or an end to U.S. presence in the war-torn country.

Many will recall that only a few weeks ago, McCain suggested that U.S. troops could be stationed in Iraq for "50, even 100 years." During the Today interview, he pointed to the U.S. troop assignments in South Korea, Japan, and Germany as an example of what he would like to see occur in Iraq.

The problem is that America's forces shouldn't be stationed all across the globe. The hidden reason for such a policy is to establish an American empire policed by U.S. troops with American diplomats telling everyone how their affairs should be run. That's a pretty succinct definition of empire.

The McCain attitude, shared by numerous Bush administration leaders who formed the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) a decade ago, has long advocated forcibly establishing American influence everywhere. PNAC members Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Khalilzad, Bolton, and a coterie of neoconservatives launched their effort during the 1990s and then brought their plans to government with the Bush administration in 2001. The PNAC Statement of Principles points to America's "global responsibilities," the need to "challenge regimes "hostile to our interest," and extend "an international order friendly to our country."

Doesn't that sound like empire?

This is hardly what the American people pay enormous taxes for. Wasn't the Defense Department created to "defend" our nation? How did it become a force to shape policy in other nations, even to force "democracy" on Iraq?

McCain defends his attitude with the claim that the "consequences of failure would be chaos and genocide in the region." What is his definition of "failure"? What is his definition of victory? According to the role he wants for American forces, it is their responsibility to keep some Iraqis from killing other Iraqis and to force democracy on a people who never asked for it. How far we have traveled from those days five years ago when the supposed reason for invading Iraq was to destroy weapons of mass destruction and prevent Saddam Hussein from using them. That he never had any such weapons, and that he had no role in the 9/11 attack, has been conveniently ignored as the building of an American empire — likely the hidden goal from the start of this war — takes over.

Troops aren't needed in Japan where they have been stationed since 1945. Japan is no enemy and can take care of herself. They aren't needed in South Korea where they have been stationed since 1950. The South Koreans have their own military establishment and don't want our forces in their country. Nor are they needed in Germany under NATO, a UN subsidiary created in 1949. We were told of a need for troops in Germany to thwart possible Soviet expansion. But the USSR imploded in the early 1990s. Add to these troop assignments the stunning fact that American forces occupy bases in a total of 130 different countries!

Can it be said too often that the purpose of maintaining a military force should be only to protect the lives, liberty, and property of the American people? Yet, McCain wants them in Iraq and elsewhere (everywhere?). His dangerous policy will swell anti-Americanism as it bankrupts this nation. Democrats jumped on McCain for his remarks. But they, too, ignore the only constitutional reason for maintaining a military force.

The answer to McCain and others is simple: Bring the troops home. When? The sooner the better.

Stiff Right Jab contributing editor, John F. McManus, is President of The John Birch Society, the publisher of The New American, and the author of William F. Buckley Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment, Financial Terrorism, Changing Commands: The Betrayal of America’s Military, and The Insiders.

WASHINGTON - The White House on Tuesday denied a published report in Israel that said President Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term in January.

A story in the Jerusalem Post quoted a "senior official" there as saying that Bush plans to attack Iran in the coming months. The story says the unidentified official claimed that a "senior member" of Bush's traveling entourage made the statement about attacking Iran in a closed meeting. Bush was in Israel last week.

The article also says the unnamed Bush official said that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "were of the opinion that military action were called for."

--------------

Of course they think military action is called for. It's the FIRST resort for this administration. Afterall Dick Cheney did sign the Project for the New American Century which has a fundamental belief that the US military should be used in an effort to force a US domination in the century following the fall of the Soviet Union.

So let's get it straight. War first..diplomacy..never.

This President is a mistake.

... is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government.

Furthermore he is further stoking the flames of hysterical fear and hatred towards China and Russia which he still percieves as the enemy. The British military historian Corelli Barnett quoted by BBC dismisses such notions:

Why do they see a threat in China? China has an enormous stake in the health of the American economy.

and Russia

Equally, with Russia, Putin worries me less than George Bush, who has invaded Iraq. Putin is simply a good, old-fashioned, cynical, nationalist politician who advances Russia's interests like Metternich and Bismarck did for Germany.

So that's that. The multi-headed right wing hydra will live no matter how many of its heads get chopped off.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

1: Media being reviewed
2: How I encountered the media
3: My general impression of the site
    (is it entertaining, engaging, interesting, etc. this
    will be subjective observation)
4: Who is communicating, and why?
5: What type of text (or medium) is it?
6: How is it produced?
7: How do we know what it means?
8: Who receives it and what sense do they make of
    it?
9: How does it present its subject?
10: Links/images

These will be general questions and I will attempt to give answers to each for each piece of media I look at.
*********************************************
That said, I'll begin this post on the Project For The Old American Century.

1: Media being reviewed

Project for the Old American Century website: www.oldamericancentury.org

2: How I encountered the media:

I came across the Project For The Old American Century website via StumbleUpon.com. I had marked one of my interests as politics and, while stumbling the internet looking for something interesting, I landed on this site.

3: My general impression of the site:

The site is well laid out and is full of interesting content. The main page contains the "Latest Headlines" which are always interesting. There's also always an interesting image on the main page. There is video, Audio, Timelines, Charts, and even a "counter-spin" section where the site rebuts some of the talking points currently in the media, and more. The site is decidedly left-wing but is also informative if this is taken into account.

4: Who is communicating, and why?

The site is run as a small, grass-roots organization whose purpose is to highlight under-reported new related to corporate and government corruption. There is no mention of the Project For The New American Century in the "About POAC" section of the website but I would be surprised if the site was not, in part, created in response to PNAC. PNAC is a neoconservative think-tank, founded in 1997, that, according to wikipedia, has had a large influence on George W. Bush's administration. Even the logos of POAC and PNAC are formatted the same.

5: What type of text (or medium) is it?

This is a website. The presentation of the site is the typical format of a news website with headlines and archives. There is also an RSS feed available so that the audience doesn't have to continually visit the website in order to receive the information provided.

6: How is it produced?

The site is produced by the staff of POAC. They conduct their own research into the stories they believe are important to cover, write the stories and produce the website.

7: How do we know what it means?

Evaluation of the POAC website reading a couple of the news stories and taking a general look at the types of stories on the site. There appears to be a leftist bias on the site. Most of the corruption stories on the site are focused on Republicans and big business. A review of the "About POAC" section of the website reveals the history of the project and gives insight into the organization's political views. According to the website, POAC was "founded in 2002 in response to a rigged election, reduced civil liberties, a hijacking of our domestic and foreign policies by the energy/defense industries, and a compliant corporate media outlet where we can not only debunk the myth of the liberal media but expose the corruption and cronyism taking place at the highest levels of government and corporate power." The general views expressed by the site reveal that the people creating POAC's news stories believe that Government and Corporate America are severely corrupted and that this corruption needs to be exposed to the people before change can occur. With this type of information available regarding the motivations of the site's producers, it is possible to evaluate the information provided by the site accordingly, acknowledging the politically left bias of the information provided.

8: Who receives it and what sense do they make of it?

The site is primarily going to be received by people who are seeking information on political corruption, are involved with left-wing politics, are researching politics online, have selected politics as an interest on StumbleUpon, etc. It is likely that the main audience for this information will be people thirty and under because those are the people of voting age who are most fluent in the internet.

9: How does it present its subject?

The site presents its subject as a mixture of the forms of the Project for the New American Century website and other news websites. The stories are given headlines with the text below. There are a few accompanying pictures but the site is primarily text. The general layout of the site and the professional, journalistic, format of the information presented give the site credibility by mimicking more mainstream news media.

10: Links/images

POAC

PNAC

The reality is that the current administration has a clear and specific vision for the future of America and the world, and they believe it's a positive vision. In order to put forward an alternative vision, it's essential to first understand the vision of America held by the New Right.

The core of the neoconservative vision was first articulated on June 3, 1997, in the Statement of Principles put forth by the Project For The New American Century. Signed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett, Jeb Bush, Gary Bauer, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Vin Weber, Steve Forbes and others from the Reagan/Bush administration, it clearly stated that "the history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership."

Frankly acknowledging that America is a small portion of the world's population but uses a large percentage of the world's oil and other natural resources, Poppy Bush is famous for having said, "The American lifestyle is not negotiable."

McMansions for two-person families, a transportation infrastructure based on 6,000-pound SUVs carrying single individuals, cheap Chinese goods at Wal-Mart and cheap Mexican food in the supermarket - all of this is not anything America intends to give up. We're king of the hill, and we intend to stay that way, even if it means going to war to keep it.

At the core of this is oil. When the administration's people say American involvement in Iraq is "not about oil," they're often responding to charges that they're only going after profits for American oil companies. They speak truth, in that context, when they say the war isn't about revenues from oil - the profits will only be a desirable side-effect. What the war is really about is the survival of the American lifestyle, which, in their world-view, is both non-negotiable and based almost entirely on access to cheap oil.

The same year Cheney, et al, wrote their papers on The New American Century, I wrote a book about the coming end of American peace and prosperity because of our dependence on a dwindling supply of oil. "Since the discovery of oil in Titusville, PA, where the world's first oil well was drilled in 1859," I wrote in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, "humans have extracted 742 billion barrels of oil from the Earth. Currently, world oil reserves are estimated at about 1,000 billion barrels, which will last (according to the most optimistic estimates of the oil industry) 'for almost 45 years at current rates of consumption.'"

But that doesn't mean that we'll suck on the straw for 45 years and then it'll suddenly stop. When about half the oil has been removed from an underground oil field, it starts to get much harder (and thus more expensive) to extract the remaining half. The last third to quarter can be excruciatingly expensive to extract - so much so that wells these days that have hit that point are usually just capped because it costs more to extract the oil than it can be sold for, or it's more profitable to ship oil in from the Middle East, even after accounting for the cost of shipping.

The halfway point of an oil field is referred to as "The Hubbert Peak," after scientist M. King Hubbert, who first pointed this out in 1956 and projected 1970 as the year for the Hubbert Peak of US oil supplies. Hubbert was off by four years - 1974 saw the initial decline in US oil production and the consequent rise in price. In 1975, Hubbert, who is now deceased, projected 2000 for a worldwide Hubbert Peak. Once that point had been hit, he and other experts suggested, the world could expect economy-destabilizing spikes in the price of oil, and wars to begin over control of this vital resource.

Most of the world has now been digitally "X-rayed" using satellites, seismic data, and computers, in the process of locating 41,000 oil fields. Over 641,000 exploratory wells have been drilled, and virtually all fields which show any promise are well-known and factored into the one-trillion barrel estimate the oil industry uses for world oil reserves.

And of that 1 trillion barrels, Saudi Arabia has about 259 billion barrels and Iraq is estimated by the US Government to have 432 billion barrels, although at the moment only about 112 billion barrels have been tapped. The rest, virgin oil, can be pumped out for as little as $1.50 a barrel, making Iraqi oil not only the most abundant in the world, but the most profitable. This at a time when virtually all American oil fields (except the Alaska North Slope) have dwindled past the Hubbert Peak into $5 to $25 per barrel pumping costs.

Thus, we see that our "lifestyle" - our ability to maintain our auto-based transportation systems, our demand for big, warm houses, and our appetite for a wide variety of cheap foods and consumer goods - is currently based on access to cheap oil. If we assume that the American people won't tolerate a change in that lifestyle, then we can extrapolate that our very security as a stable democracy is dependent on cheap oil.

Viewed in this context, the rush to seize control of the Middle East - where about a third of the planet's oil is located - makes perfect sense. It's a noble endeavor, in that view, maintaining the strength and vitality of the American Empire.

Of course, there are a few cracks in this vision. In order to have such a new American century, we must be willing to foul our waters and air with the byproducts of oil combustion and oil-fired power plants, and tolerate the explosions in cancer they bring. We must be willing to gamble that raising CO2 levels won't destabilize the atmosphere and tip us into a new ice age by shutting down the Great Conveyor Belt warm-water currents in the Atlantic. We must be willing to hold the rest of the world off at the point of a bayonet, and to take on the England/Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine type of terrorism that inevitably comes when people decide to assert nationalism and confront empire.

And, perhaps most distressing, the third George to be President of the United States must be willing to clamp down on his own dissident citizens the same way that King George III of England did in 1776. These are the requirements of empire.

The last American statesman to put forth a different vision was President Jimmy Carter, who candidly pointed out to the American people that oil was a dwindling domestic resource. Carter said that we mustn't find ourselves in a position of having to fight wars to seize other people's oil, and that a decade or two of transition to renewable energy sources would ensure the stability and future of America without destabilizing the rest of the world.

It would even lead to a cleaner environment and a better quality of life. Carter put in place energy tax credits and incentives that birthed an exploding new industry based on building solar-heated homes, windmill-powered communities, and the development of fuel alternatives to petroleum.

Ronald Reagan's first official act of office was to remove Carter's solar panels from the roof of the White House. He then repealed Carter's tax incentives for renewable energy and killed off an entire industry. No president since then has had the courage or vision to face the hard reality that Carter shared with us.

And so now we discover these oddities. Osama bin Laden, for example, explicitly said that he had attacked the US because we had troops stationed on the holy soil of his homeland - a position not that different from Northern Irish, Palestinian, Tamil, and Kashmiri terrorists. And our troops are there to protect our access to Saudi oil, a dependence legacy we inherited from Reagan's rejection of Carter's initiatives.

If we are to hold a vision of America that doesn't depend on foreign sources of oil and doesn't require the enormous expenditures of money and blood to project and protect empire, simply saying "stop the war" isn't enough. We must clearly articulate a vision of what America could be in a world in balance, a world at peace, and a world where the planet's vital natural resources are protected and renewed. This is the ultimate family value, the highest patriotism, and the most desperately needed story to guide the next generation of Americans.

As President John F. Kennedy said in his 1961 Inaugural Address, "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

Thom Hartmann is the author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight." www.thomhartmann.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached. ]]> http://brasseriefoucault.wordpress.com/?p=12 Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:00:23 +0000 brasseriefoucault http://brasseriefoucault.wordpress.com/?p=12 Da quando Robert Michels parlò di legge ferrea dell’oligarchia si è finalmente svelata la realtà delle moderne democrazie: a parole, governo del popolo, nei fatti governo di un’elite. L’indice di democraticità di un paese è dato, allora, non dall’assenza di oligarchie e gruppi d’interesse ma dal carattere inclusivo e dalla libera concorrenza fra gruppi che riescono ad accedere di volta in volta al potere. La poliarchia, la libera competizione fra lobby aperte, è sempre stata l’essenza stessa della democrazia USA. Purtroppo questa nobile tradizione politica è stata interrotta con le ultime presidenze di Bush jr che hanno visto la totale egemonia dei neoconservatori.

I neocon, al di là della loro ideologia militarista, hanno due colpe principali: avere bloccato il carattere fluido del sistema USA con pratiche nepotistiche degne della peggiore italietta ed avere screditato quanto di buono aveva fatto la destra radicale paleocon o public choice che, a prescindere dalle proprie idee politiche, ha rappresentato l’anima della rivoluzione liberale degli anni 80; una rivoluzione con la quale anche la sinistra ha dovuto fare i conti.

Il programma di mandato della presidenza Bush, che è il programma neocon, elaborato dai think tank conservatori già ai tempi di Clinton, è il Project for the New American Century (PNAC), ampiamente diffuso dalla maggiore stampa americana e limpidamente consultabile sul web; ma forse non sempre letto con attenzione. Per capire le strategie dell’America di Bush basta andare alle fonti: www.newamericancentury.org.

Gli Stati Uniti sono un paese democratico ma non egualitarista. Le informazioni circolano in modo trasparente, apparentemente accessibile a tutti; in realtà la comunicazione politica avviene a due livelli. Di massa ed esoterico. La comunicazione della Right Nation ha sfruttato quest’ultimo canale circolando nei salotti delle elites che contano. I neocon hanno esplicitato, quindi, la loro ideologia militarista con chiarezza; ma è la comunicazione di massa che spesso non ha colto lo spirito del disegno neoconservatore, concentrandosi su aspetti secondari, come la guerra preventiva, l’esportazione (forzata) della democrazia, la lotta al terrore.

Il cuore della politica del PNAC è che gli USA sono un impero; l’unica superpotenza dopo il collasso dell’URSS. E’ compito degli USA, allora, intervenire in ogni angolo del pianeta per contrastare tutte le minacce potenziali ed instaurare quella che, eufemisticamente, chiamano Pax Americana. Un sistema globale che sia favorevole agli interessi economici e strategici degli USA.

La pietra angolare di questa visione è stata l’Iraq. Già all’epoca di Bush padre, Bagdad era semplicemente un problema non risolto. La battaglia definitiva si doveva combattere in Asia, dove sono concentrate le risorse energetiche. Questo è quello che contava.

Il rapporto PNAC del 2000 chiaramente diceva che “mentre il conflitto irrisolto in Iraq fornisce un'immediata giustificazione (per la presenza militare USA) la necessità di una presenza sostanziale delle forze americane nel Golfo trascende la questione del regime di Saddam Hussein”.

Il lindore col quale questa realpolitik militarista ed aggressiva viene decantata è disarmante. Ed è ancora più spiazzante, leggendo la nostra tabella, capire che i neocon non influenzano il governo, sono il governo. Tutti i nomi fatti si riferiscono a persone che, quando non organiche al PNAC, hanno comunque sottoscritto o firmato documenti pubblici di indirizzo di governo promossi dal think tank. Altre figure meno importanti del PNAC sono omesse solo per agilità di consultazione.

Abbiamo cercato di ricostruire anche i rapporti fra gli attori di questo network. I rapporti colla grande industria del petrolio sono organici. Dalla lettura traspare, inoltre, che la lobby è blindata anche col ricorso a politiche parentali.

Questo è il potere USA, oggi. Un potere che ha perseguito obiettivi fallimentari a livello nazionale ed internazionale. Un sistema nepotistico che è un brusco risveglio dal sogno dell’età dell’innocenza per la Democrazia Americana.

• Bill Kristol: Fondatore del PNAC e del Weekly Standard di R. Murdoch; ha ricoperto cariche istituzionali sotto Reagan e Bush Sr.; è, inoltre, figlio di Irving, influente neocon

• John Podhoretz: Giornalista di Fox News e Weekly Standard; ha lavorato con Reagan e Bush Sr.; è, inoltre, figlio di Norman, influente neocon e membro diplomazia USA

• Donald Rumsfeld: Segetario della Difesa fino al 2006, quando si è dovuto dimettere per il fallimento della politica americana in Iraq

• Paul Wolfowitz: Vice segretario della Difesa, planner delle politiche americane in Iraq e presidente della World Bank, prima di essersi dimesso per l'accusa di aver favorito l'amante

• Dick Cheney: Fondatore del PNAC, vice-presidente USA e memembro del CdA della Halliburton, multinazionale texana del petrolio, con sede a Dubai ed interessi in Iraq; la Halliburton ha rilevato la Dresser, diretta dal nonno di Bush e dove ha lavorato anche il padre dell'attuale presidente USA

• Frederick Kagan: Firmatario PNAC, membro dell'America Enterprise Institute (dove lavora la moglie di Cheney), architetto della politica USA in Iraq. E' fratello di Robert e figlio di Donald

• Robert Kagan: Professore, fondatore del PNAC, scrive per il Weekly Standard; è sposato con Victoria, ambasciatrice USA presso la NATO e consigliera di D. Cheney.

Alessio Postiglione

(pubblicato su Notizie Verdi del 15 07 07)

In the late spring of 2001, Vice President Cheney held a series of top secret meetings with the representatives of Exxon-Mobil, Conoco, Shell and BP America for what was later called the Energy Task-force. Their job, ostensibly, was to map out America's Energy future. Since late 2001 several public interest groups, including the very conservative Judicial Watch, sued to have the proceedings of those meetings opened to public scrutiny. In March 2002, the Commerce Department turned over a few documents from the Task-force meetings to Judicial Watch, among which was the map of Iraq's Oil Fields, dated March 2001 (above) and a list of the existing "Foreign Suitors" for Iraq Oil. Since that time, Cheney's office has fought fiercely (and so far, successfully), right up to the Supreme Court, to keep the proceeding secret and to keep any of the private industry officials from disclosing any information about the meetings. Since we all now know the Bush administration's energy policy, there can be only one explanation for the extraordinary efforts Cheney has taken to keep this secret--he was discussing the potential for a takeover of Iraq's oil  with the companies that might manage the resource, even before 9/11 gave him the excuse to do it.

A little context would be helpful. In early 2001, the Saudi's were growing impatient that the large American Military presence in their land was causing tension from Muslim clerics who joined Bin Laden's 1996 call for the "infidel to leave the Holy places of Islam". In late 2001, the Saudi's prevented the U.S. from using our Saudi Air Base for attacks on Afghanistan. As the New York Times reported, our departure from Saudi Arabia was abrupt.

The Prince Sultan base, which at the height of the war this spring housed 10,000 American troops and 200 planes, has now been supplanted as the Middle East's main American military air operations center by Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

This last phase of the American departure from the base occurred with almost no fanfare, attracting only minor mention in the Saudi press. ''It was as if they were never here,'' a senior Saudi official said. ''They left very quietly.''

Most of the senior policy makers in the Bush administration had as early as January 26, 1998 (while they were still out of power) made explicit their Iraq regime change policy in an extraordinary open letter to President Clinton.

In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

So for Cheney in the spring of 2001, the desired outcome of U.S. control of Iraq was not in doubt. What was of concern as you can see from the "Oil Suitor List" (here and here) was that both China and Russia had signed "production sharing contracts" with the Iraq Oil Ministry to develop most of the major fields. The reason this becomes important now is that with yesterday's agreement in the Iraqi Parliament over Amnesty and Revenue Sharing, the American Embassy is now pushing hard for an Iraq Oil Law which would open up huge new concessions to the Oil Companies that were part of Cheney's Task force. This rush for a new law confuses the Iraqis.

And as Tariq Shafiq, one of the three-member team charged with drafting the petroleum law for the Iraq Ministry of Oil suggested at the hearing, because Iraq itself doesn't need to develop those untapped reserves for another decade, pressure to immediately implement any provision that would open them up for exploration and development "fuels the argument" that the Americans and British "are there for the oil."

There has been a very informed discussion on these pages recently, about the role of U.S. Hard Power in a world increasingly dominated by economic and cultural Soft Power moves by our commercial rivals around the globe. If we are to have an honest discussion about imperialism, mercantilism and the role of our government in an everchanging landscape, wouldn't shining a little sunlight on the discussions of the Cheney Energy Task-force be a place to start?

Now, I know many people will shriek that "9/11 changed everything." But they are wrong. 9/11 didn't change Bush's foreign policy. A neocon cabal, many of the same people who were involved with The Project For The New American Century, changed the policy. 9/11 was the "new Pearl Harbor" of which they spoke. It was a catalyzing event that accelerated their militant plans of global American hegemony.

The Republicans have castigated Ron Paul for his devotion to a foreign policy of non-intervention. In 2000 they nominated a man who favored a very similar foreign policy. Today it is unfathomable to most Republicans that the U.S. should not effect regime change in countries all over the world. If you don't share their love of global military domination they'll tell you you're not really a Republican. But, this you tube says it all. Just listen to Bush in 2000, and remember he was the REPUBLICAN nominee for president. My, my, how far the party has fallen.

In his latest middle finger to the American Public, Bush decided to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. A 1999 series of U.S. war games determined that an invasion of Iraq would require 400,000 troops. The recent move would give us a total of approximately 130,000 troops in the region; still far short of 400,000. What does this accomplish? That George W. is still in office says a lot about the ideology and unfortunately the apathy of the American public.

From being led into a war under false pretenses to ignoring his own congress, the lack of accountability is astounding. In his January 11 broadcast, Keith Olberman provided bullet-point commentary on why this latest move will fail. Citing a complete lack of credibility, Olbermann managed to outline the presidential lies in a 2.5 minute speech. Watch it here:

Olbermann is not the only one to disagree with the latest move. In the January 10 edition of the Washington Post, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel opined that the U.S.:

...misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam.

Is it so presumptuous to think that the Christian-right's Democracy is not the same freedom other people seek. What arrogance is it that we should go into a foreign country under the pretense of liberation and Democracy. I do believe Bush said he was not a "Nation Builder".

Instead of calling this a fight against terror, liberation, Democracy bringing etc., why not call it what it is; angling for a strategic position in the middle east for future conquests in Europe and especially Asia. One of the core foundations of PNAC is that the U.S. must build a political and military presence in the Middle East as a staging point for future wars.

I suppose now is a good time to invest in Real Estate...