Richard Noggin Saturday: Bigus Dickus

Even with as many dick heads as there are to choose from this week, I thought a change of pace may be needed.

“And now for something a little different”

Bigus Dickus

Why The USA Can’t Leave Iraq

B’Man: From Gorilla’s Guides, we have an editorial that expresses (from an Iraqi perspective) the rationale for our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq (and the intense possibility of going into Iran). Although I disagree with the final association with “Americans” and what we can do to change what is happening to them, I cannot disagree with the rationale assessment for “why” we are doing it.

I do have an alternative solution, but it means ridding ourselves of the dependence on oil (which means Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al) will fight my solution with every fiber of their body.

Our country has been hijacked and in many ways, Americans don’t “seem” to care. This is where I believe the editors get the overall thing incorrect. Americans, by and large, disagree with what is happening. It is only a very select few who speak for us (and I want to take them out for what they say does not represent my feelings and desires).

Why the USA can’t leave Iraq

Posted by Editors on July 5, 2008

Have you noticed that the US anti-war debate has begun to resemble Congress’s attitude to Iraq and Iran? There’s mild criticism of the Bush administration’s devastation of Iraq but the president does whatever he wants in Iraq and makes absurd accusations against Iran unchallenged. Debate concentrates on mistakes made rather than asking why such immense costs are being expended in the first instance. More than most Americans, the anti-war movement examines the Iraq war in detail and it is realizing consciously what the US political class already know. There are no mistakes. The US is staring over a cliff and is going to go over. It cannot leave Iraq. If he can find a plausible reason, President Bush will be allowed to invade Iran as well. Everyone will then pretend that it’s all another tragic mistake.

Two factors make up the cliff that America nears:

• Simple supply and demand: the depletion of oil reserves, the necessity for the oil producers to conserve supplies and the inevitable effects of oil price rises on the world’s most intensive oil user (see What the US Congress knows about Iraq and Iran).
• The US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. This requires some explanation.

A reserve currency is one that all countries will accept for trade purposes. It is really a substitute for gold because there is not enough gold to underpin the world’s currencies. It is particularly useful for trading oil, which is normally priced in dollars. Most countries also hold much of their foreign currency reserves in dollars both for this purpose and because the US has been regarded as a politically and financially stable country.

Unhappily, the US is running a trade and current account deficit, that is, it pays other countries more dollars in trade and services than it receives. The US is essentially a business running at a loss. You might wonder where it gets the dollars to pay for the difference between cash received and cash paid. Firstly, it uses the capital inflows from foreign investors. This is like spending borrowed money because investors are entitled to take their money back. Secondly, it can print money. That’s right. To get a billion dollars cash, the government simply prints the banknotes or interest bearing treasury notes for any amount it needs. These are purchased both within the US and by foreign investors and governments who can use them for trade generally, not necessarily with the US.

Now, it is not always a bad thing to print money; indeed, in an expanding economy it is essential to increase the “money supply”. Unfortunately, the US economy is not expanding. The money supply increase is to support increased borrowing, both domestic and foreign. It is of concern to many that in March 2006 the US Federal Reserve Bank ceased publishing M3 data, which is the broad measure of money supply. The fear is that this was to hide an inflationary borrowing.

Inflation in a reserve currency is a bad thing. Other governments’ reserves are devalued – they need more dollars to buy the same amount of oil and anything else priced in dollars. They might think it better to keep their foreign exchange reserves in euros, yen or a basket that corresponds more to their trade pattern. Investors don’t like inflation because both their capital investment and earnings are worth less. They will look for a more stable home for their investments.

There are particular concerns in the case of the USA:

• The level of government debt is now 9.5 trillion dollars with interest payable of about 450 billion dollars per year. This can only come from taxation (depressing the economy) or printing more money (fuelling inflation).
• The US economy is arguably contracting. Figures for jobs and GNP do not necessarily provide an accurate picture. The types of jobs and distribution of income, for example, need to be taken into account.
• Much US manufacturing has shifted off-shore or closed down. The industrial base is weak; industry is increasingly uncompetitive against China, India and other Asian countries. US financial and other services are highly vulnerable to European and Asian competition.
• The recent sub-prime mortgage problems, crash in house prices and massive increase in liquidity in response from the Federal Reserve bring into question the Federal Reserve’s monetary competence (money supply and interest rate policy).
• Government borrowing against present and future expenditure commitments is unsustainable. The USA is living beyond its means, according to David Walker, recently retired US Comptroller-General who is the government’s top accountant (see video at the end of this article). This calls into question the US government’s fiscal competence (taxation and government spending policy).
• Due to increasing competition for a diminishing supply, oil is being bartered or direct access agreements are being made between states. This undermines the petrodollar (dollars reserved for or involved in oil transactions).
• Oil is being priced in currencies other than the US dollar and large-scale oil barter schemes are being established between Venezuela-South America and Iran-China/Japan, also undermining the petrodollar.

There is plenty here to worry international investors and holders of dollar reserves – and they are worried. The change in the dollar’s value demonstrates this:

1 April 2002: = 1.14 euro

1 April 2008: = 0.64 euro

Over this period, foreign governments and international investors have seen their dollar reserves, US investments and earnings lose 43 per cent against the euro, 33 per cent against the yen and 18 per cent against the rupee. This means that a manufacturer holding euros at present has an oil-buying advantage of 43 per cent over an American manufacturer, compared with their positions in 2002. The same is true of other commodities priced in dollars. This is why some governments are selling their dollar reserves.

If oil ceases to be traded in dollars, an important reason for the dollar’s reserve currency status will have disappeared and if it should lose reserve status, the US will find few foreign buyers for its paper debt. If foreign investors disinvest in the US as well, its economy could well collapse.

It does not increase international confidence in the US government’s financial policies and regulatory systems that the US has in the last few years exported to other countries many billions of dollars in worthless sub-prime mortgage “securities”. Nor does it help that debt supports its high profile wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the threatened war against Iran.

Here we come to the imperative for the US to seize the Iraqi and Iranian oilfields. With its own oil nearing exhaustion, it cannot in future afford to purchase the enormous proportion of the world’s oil production on which its living standards are based. Its industrial production is uncompetitive, currency depreciating, finances supported by debt and, recently, its banks and investment houses have been supported by printed money in defiance of its much vaunted free market principles. The US needs an alternative philosophy and finds that it does not have one. It needs to change but cannot bring itself to change.

If the US fails to put its economy and finances into a fit state for world competition it could be paying 500 dollars per barrel, perhaps 1,000 dollars per barrel for oil in five or 10 years time. This is why it cannot leave Iraq and why direct control of the Iranian oilfields are also desirable. Of course its actions in Iraq are themselves creating instability.

I have previously suggested from circumstantial evidence that the US is stealing Iraqi oil and falsifying the statistics. In fact, no statistics for the past five years of US occupation exist. The Iraqi oil fields and export terminals have been unmetered for this period. (See the 2007 report of the International and Advisory Monitoring Board (IAMB) on Iraq, operating under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483. The published production and export statistics have no validity whatever. One may reasonably conjecture that the trading records are of similar quality. The IAMB also reports that barter agreements for oil are not accounted for by the Development Fund for Iraq as required by UN Security Council Resolution 1483. In terms of even the most basic standards of accounting and accountability this can only be called scandalous and criminal. It makes a mockery of the US government’s claims to be developing Iraq and reveals the simple truth behind the invasion of Iraq. The invasion was a strategic plan to seize oil supplies that the US government will soon be in no position to purchase.

We have tended to think that the American people have been deceived by the Bush administration’s lies. It appears that, although initially this was the case, America has realized the truth but cannot admit its complicity. It cares about its high living standards and American deaths, not Iraqi or Afghan poverty and deaths. The American people do not recognize themselves in the mirror. They evidently see only fantasy images, unrelated to reality, derived from films. The reality that others see is horrific.  If President Bush can engineer an excuse and a plan involving low American casualties, America will permit him to invade Iran as well – and pretend that it did not know the truth.

David Walker, recently-retired US Comptroller-General, totalled up the US government’s income, liabilities and future obligations. He concluded the numbers don’t add up. Courtesy: CBS, 8 July 2007

Rattling the Cage: Cosby, Oprah, Powell, Rice - and Obama

Let’s face it - the thing that gives Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy its incredible BUZZ is the fact that he’s black. (OK, actually half-black, half-white, but such Americans identify themselves as one or the other, and Obama has identified himself as black and that’s the way he’s taken, so for all intents and purposes he’s black.)

I’m not saying he’s gotten to where he is only because he’s black. That’s not the point I am trying to make. There have been other black candidates for US president - Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes, at least. But what set Obama apart from them, from the start of his campaign, was that he truly had a chance to get to the White House - because of his unusual charisma, intelligence and knack for the “vision thing”; his essentially mainstream politics; and his self-definition as an all-American, not black American, leader.

So I think it’s fair to say Obama would have been a presidential contender even if he were white [if he claimed being white, which he could.. And if he was precieved that way] - just on the strength of his personal qualities. But what gives his candidacy such electricity, what makes him so “hot,” what makes his campaign into an honest-to-God movement and what makes people, especially the young and the liberal, want to be a part of it, is the fact that he’s a black contender. The possibility that America, whose history has been so blighted by white racism, will elect a black president - the sensation of it, the nearly messianic prospect of such a thing actually happening, brings tremendous added value to Obama’s candidacy.

And he obviously knows it. His message is mainly himself: a black man (OK, half black African, half white American– and I am tired of clarifying myself!] ) who really could become president of the United States. That, not his politics, is at the heart of Obama-mania. As great a speaker as he is, I don’t think his speeches would have the galvanic power they have if he were white.

He can depict a vision of a multi-racial, multi-cultural, equal-opportunity America like no other political leader partly because of his superior rhetoric and oratory, but also because he alone not only depicts the vision, he embodies it.

In the political movement he leads, he is irreplaceable. Without Obama, there’s no movement. Without Obama to give it flesh, his message seems banal.

By being the first black American with a shot at the White House, Obama offers a truly messianic vision - of an America that, by virtue of having elected a black president, will have finally washed its long, terrible racial history clean. A fresh, new America, one where race doesn’t matter any more. A black president, Obama’s hardcore supporters seem to believe, would revolutionize race relations in America, or at least improve them greatly.

I DISAGREE. The vision of a racially healed America after Obama becomes president is just pie-in-the-sky.

To an extent, though, I’m also somewhat excited by the idea of a black president. Having someone other than a white man in the White House can’t hurt. Good lord the last 8 years has to change no matter what. It would probably even help a little. It would make some people feel better about America. I’m sure I’d be one of them. [I like deluding myself at times--lol]

But America remains a rather obviously segregated country, especially when it comes to where people live and who their friends are. I don’t think that’s going to change if Obama wins on November 4.

More importantly, I do not see blacks living in what’s called the “culture of poverty” - with unstable families, violence, ignorance, teenage pregnancy, drugs and alcohol, crime and various other social pathologies - breaking out of it because they’ve got a new, better-than-ever role model.

Blacks in America’s ghettos don’t lack for role models. Maybe the most respected, beloved public figure in the country is a black woman, Oprah Winfrey. Her title probably used to be held by Bill Cosby when he was in the limelight; now he’s a revered American elder. For the last eight years, the US Secretary of State has been black - first Colin Powell, who might well have gotten elected president if he’d have run, and now Condoleezza Rice, a leading future contender for the presidency if she seeks it.

Has the example of Cosby, or Oprah, or Powell, or Rice gotten one black American out of the ghetto? Maybe, who knows– I doubt it, and I doubt that a President Obama could pull it off, either. But then again, I am a jaded person, remember. Lol.

AND AS for America’s white racists, those who would never vote for any black presidential candidate, they haven’t been swayed by Cosby, Oprah, Powell, Rice or anybody else, so why should they be swayed by a President Obama? A black president might even make them hate blacks more, make them even more convinced the blacks are “taking over.” Now that is a very scary thought! Supremists more angry. Geeeeece.

I am old enough to remember an America where there were no blacks in any positions of leadership, when a black man in a business suit drew stares because it was such an unusual sight, when a walk-on black character in a TV sitcom was a shock. This was American life before about 1967 or 1968. I remember when the only black elected official of note was Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem, when no American city or town had a black mayor, and I remember the hope for an end to ghettos and racism with the election of the first black mayors, congressmen, senators and governors.

It never came.

The civil rights movement and the black power movement brought “legal equality” to blacks, forced the government to start spending money in black communities on schools, hospitals and the like, and enabled the emergence of a large, solid black middle class that is now in its third generation and growing steadily.Some hearts have changed– but racism is still alive in America.

But after 40 years of black “mainstreaming” and the rise of countless blacks to positions of power, America’s urban ghettos are as big and as bad as they ever were, if not bigger and worse. The same goes for America’s prisons, which are about 50% black.

Meanwhile, at the unofficial level, in people’s neighborhoods, in people’s social circles, America, though much less so than it was 40 years ago, is still basically a segregated country. White ghettos and lower educational levels across the board have grown. Ignorance is the chief contributor to racism.

The election of a black president would not be a breakthrough for America - it would be a logical continuation of America’s openness to letting blacks rise as high as their ambitions and abilities can take them. I don’t think a President Obama would make America’s black middle class any larger, because they’ll do fine without any more role models. He wouldn’t make the black ghettos any smaller or less deadly because role models don’t seem to have done any good there, and he wouldn’t shrink the preserves of white racism because they’re allergic to people like him.

The glow over the election of a black president would last a few days, then it would be over, and afterward Obama would succeed or fail in office for the same reasons every other president has. If he gets to the White House, he might change America like he promises - but if he does, it won’t be because he’s black.

USA Drug Policy: Dismal Failure

Bruce Mirken at AlterNet provides some detail into the Drug War that is a dismal failure, espcially when comparing to the rogue “drug countries” such as Holland. Is it any wonder that Big Money is involved and that even this war is one that is based off of profit and no clear rationale for victory?

Just like our other policies in the world stage, we are full of shit when it comes to rationale and the numbers can’t lie. Only the idiots running this country are lying:

The World Health Organization Documents Failure of U.S. Drug Policies

The United States has some of the world’s most punitive drug policies and has led the cheering section for tough “war on drugs” policies worldwide, but a new international study suggests that those policies have been a crashing failure. A World Health Organization survey of 17 countries, conducted by some of the world’s leading substance abuse researchers, found that we have the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use.

The numbers are startling. In the United States, 42.4 percent admitted having used marijuana. The only other nation that came close was New Zealand, another bastion of get-tough policies, at 41.9 percent. No one else was even close. The results for cocaine use were similar, with the United States leading the world by a large margin.

This study is important because it’s the first time a respected international group has surveyed drug use around the world, using the same questions and procedure everywhere. While many countries have their own drug use surveys, the questions and methodology vary, and comparisons between countries are difficult. This new study eliminates that problem.

Some of the most striking numbers are from the Netherlands, where adults are permitted to possess a small of marijuana and purchase it from regulated businesses. Some U.S. officials have claimed that these Dutch policies have created some sort of decadent cesspool of drug abuse, but the new study demolishes such assertions: In the Netherlands, only 19.8 percent have used marijuana, less than half the U.S. figure.

Even more striking is what the researchers found when they asked young adults when they had started using marijuana. Again, the United States led the world, with 20.2 percent trying marijuana by age 15. No other country was even close, and in the Netherlands, just 7 percent used marijuana by 15 — roughly one-third of the U.S. figure.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy tried to dismiss the study, Bloomberg News reported:

Trying to find a link between drug use and drug enforcement doesn’t make sense, said Tom Riley, spokesman for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington. “The U.S. has high crime rates but we spend a lot on law enforcement and prison,” Riley said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Should we spend less? We’re just a different kind of country. We have higher drug use rates, a higher crime rate, many things that go with a highly free and mobile society.”

Funny, ONDCP takes precisely the opposite line whenever a state considers liberalizing its marijuana laws. In a March press release, deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns railed against a New Hampshire proposal to decriminalize marijuana, saying such a move “sends the wrong message to New Hampshire’s youth, students, parents, public health officials and the law enforcement community,” and would lead to “more drugs, drug users and drug dealers on their streets and communities.”

Back in 2002, denouncing a proposed marijuana law reform in Nevada, ONDCP distributed a list of talking points to prosecutors specifically slamming the “extremely dubious” Dutch system of regulated sales, saying, “Increased availability of marijuana leads to increased use of marijuana and other drugs.”

In fact, ONCDP’s latest excuse for the failure of U.S. drug policies — that enforcement and penalties don’t really have much effect on rates of use — is probably just about right. But it also dynamites any justification for our current marijuana laws. The WHO researchers put it this way:

“The U.S., which has been driving much of the world’s drug research and drug policy agenda, stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis, despite punitive illegal drug policies. … The Netherlands, with a less criminally punitive approach to cannabis use than the US, has experienced lower levels of use, particularly among younger adults. Clearly, by itself, a punitive policy towards possession and use accounts for limited variation in nation level rates of illegal drug use.”

For this we arrest 830,000 Americans a year on marijuana charges?