Psychopolitik 2.0

Cunning Realist, in reference to this:

Ponder it for a moment. We are now in the mosque-rebuilding business in the Middle East, smack-dab in the middle of a civil war […] We are asking 20-year olds from Tulsa and Des Moines and Gary and Fresno to navigate hundreds of years of religious and ethnic hate and to sacrifice their feet, legs, hands, arms, eyes, and lives in the process. We asked them to remove Saddam and his regime, and they did that. We asked them to guard infrastructure, and they did that. We asked them to rebuild an entire nation’s military from scratch, and they are doing it. We asked them to find WMD’s, and they tried. Now, we’re rebuilding mosques.

If this doesn’t show the blatant absurdity behind nation-building in general & the neo-imperialist foreign policy in particular, I don’t know what does.

tags: Iraq, US+military, US+foreign+policy]]>

six twenty-one US ports being bought by a company out of Dubai amounts to race-baiting for votes, period. It’s an election year, & “security” has been redefined to mean random hypocritical anti-arab barking, those people could care less about anything but scaring people into a vote. The whole fuss is transparent, & meaningless since control of security will not switch hands.

Having said that, there is something to bark about on this: Bush threatening to finally pull out his veto pen & ram this through isn’t being “soft on security”, it’s Corporate Socialism. You see in the media P&O (the British seller) and DP World (the United Arab Emirates-based buyer), but there are some other names not mentioned:

-”Baker Botts”, of which James Baker is senior partner
-Halliburton
-Carlyle Group
-CSX, formerly headed by John Snow

As broken down on Kos (though you can find this from other sites simply by a Google search with “DP World” & “Carlyle” as the search terms), this is the end-point of a series of deals obtained via political power that all coincidentally benefit Bush’s father & his friends. Surprised? Hell no.

The fact is, this type of corporate circle-jerk will continue until there is an ownership change. THIS kind of ownership change:

…In reality, the rightful owners are the residents of each of the port cities, the workers who work there and the companies who do business there

 

this — a note on an obvious crony pick slipped onto the Federal Reserve board — is pretty much the only reason I still read things like The New Republic. Apparently some dude got on whose biggest accomplishment is marrying the daughter of a bigtime GOP donor & is described as having an annoying habit of calling people “bruh” (the article misspells this slang as “bra”, but who expects them to know that type of stuff?).

There’s a right way to do things, even if they’re wrong. By that, I mean that while an act may be in and of itself foolish or pointless, how you carry out that act still matters; your next move within the overall strategy could be the difference between a fairly stinging-albeit-surviveable dissappointment & the mother of all cluster-f*cks. This won’t prove that adage as blatantly as the occupation of Iraq has — unless you do a Deep Politics stretch on this, no one’s going to be bombed or tortured because of bad monetary policy — but it adds to the pile of cases where a Bad (in this case, there being a Federal Reserve at all) is now begging to become a Worse (the head of the Fed being yet another inflation nut & one of the other seats filled by a dullard).

As bad as these exhibits of cronyism are standing alone, the cumulative effect is, IMO, particularly troubling for advocates of sacking the State on 4th Down. See, when relatively qualified people are placed in positions of political power & they screw up anyway, it implies an indictment of that power itself, and every little bit of that helps us make the case that the issue is better off out of the hands of government in the first place. Cronyism is dangerous from a libertarian perspective — strategically speaking — because it changes the likely narrative when the inevitable occurs. Rather than an indictment of the position itself, people end up barking along the lines of “if only we had the RIGHT people as our elite, then everything would be fine!”, which to the naive actually legitimizes what it should’ve discredited.

Keep that in mind next time there’s an opening for an appointment. They’re not going to succeed anyway, but it’s better that they fail due to the system than because of who’s running it.

tags: Federal+Reserve, Ben+Bernanke, Libertarianism]]>

Thank you, Illinois:

[Illinois Gov. Rod] Blagojevich says he didn’t realize “The Daily Show” was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled governor.

“It was going to be an interview on contraceptives … that’s all I knew about it,” Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday’s editions. “I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was ‘the gay governor.’ “

More thoughful content will come tommorow, when I’m not drunk.

tags: Illinois, Rod+Blagojevich, The+Daily+Show]]>

I smell civil war:

A wave of sectarian strife and recrimination swept Iraq Thursday after Wednesday’s bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra. The Interior Ministry said that more than 100 people have been killed in the violence.

Officials in Baghdad, struggling to restore order, expanded an existing curfew in an effort to get people off the streets after dark and canceled all leaves for Iraqi security forces.

The process of forming a new government also appeared to be in jeopardy, as some Sunni politicians, protesting what they said was a lack of protection for Sunni mosques attacked overnight, said they were pulling out of negotiations with Shiite parties.

That’s it. The war in Iraq has gotten to the point where everything that’s gone downhill is so obvious it had to be intentional. There’s sectarian violence not because our politicians didn’t somehow know that there would be, but because they wanted it that way. What we’ve thought all this time was the occupation going wrong was in fact the occupation going just how it was expected.

Anyone wanna bet that this spills over the border?

tags: Iraq, US+foreign+policy]]>

“indian give” on declassified documents for no apparent reason:

U.S. intelligence agencies have been secretly removing from public access at the National Archives thousands of historical documents that were available for years, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the CIA and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton, the Times said on its Web site.

The secret program accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the September 11 attacks, according to archives records, the paper said.

Anyone who made copies of this stuff when it wasn’t classified, feel free to put it online. I’m really curious as to what the info is that we’re (implicitly) being told “whoops, you weren’t supposed to see that” about, especially in context of current events.

tags: Bush, CIA, Bill+Clinton]]>

Roaming death squads? Brilliant!!”

Whenever someone who supports the war in Iraq starts barking about “we’re on the road to victory!” or other similar pseudo-patriotic bromides, I can’t resist asking them just WTF they define victory as being — what are “we” winning? What gain is there from this?

There is none, of course, but willful ignorance amuses me. As does the following re: Iraq’s Ministry of Interior:

Bribery is said to be so rampant [in Iraqi detention facilities] that a standard list of under-the-table fees has apparently evolved. Mohammed Abid, a defense lawyer in Baghdad, says clients describe prices that range from 30,000 Iraqi dinar (about $21) for one minute on a mobile phone to $40,000 in U.S. currency for release from custody. Those rates are independently confirmed by an Iraqi police officer who has spent two years working at Al Hakimiya and does not wish to be named, out of fear and shame. “I’m coming forward for reasons that are between me and Allah,” he says. “I have done things. I needed to tell someone.” He says torture and beatings are part of the daily routine, creating an eager market for guards who sell painkillers to the inmates.

Sorta puts a rather morbid spin on the “markets in everything” bit the guys at Marginal Revolution like to run, huh?

tags: Iraq]]>

“Yeah, it’s bad, but I don’t see you yellin at everyone else selling stuff over there”. Read the whole thing, they basically nailed it.

Our relations with China have so many “yeah, but” & “uh, no comment” bits intertwined that the term “double standard” doesn’t really go far enough. If they’re too evil for Google to deal with them then they’re too evil for anyone else to deal with, you can’t have it both ways.

Speaking of Google & Yahoo specifically, this type of stuff goes to the whole nature of government: contrary to the sole legitimate reason for their existence, they all act as “gate-keepers” of some sort, China just makes it more obvious. To do business these days you practically have to enter into a quid-pro-quo with the reigning elite of the country you’re in — whether it’s the U.S. way where you get subsidies & customized loopholes in exchange for greasing a few congressional palms, or helping turn in dissenting voices as a condition for market access, or turning a blind eye to — or even requesting — slave labor. The way things are set up, business as the average Joe thinks of it is a handicap; government wants you to play ball, or it wants you gone.

I’m a free-trade guy, & I don’t think there should be barriers thrown up. Everyone locking each other out just props up the inefficient at home. Yet I think many free-traders in the mainstream make a critical error in failing to realize just how deeply unfree trade has been. It goes well beyond just selling from one place to another.

tags: US+politics, globalization, China, Google, Yahoo]]>

the bad news:

The Bush administration helped derail a Senate bid to investigate a warrantless eavesdropping program yesterday after signaling it would reject Congress’s request to have former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and other officials testify about the program’s legality. The actions underscored a dramatic and possibly permanent drop in momentum for a congressional inquiry, which had seemed likely two months ago.

Although, there’s a silver lining:

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over its internal documents and legal opinions about the program within 20 days — or explain its reasons for refusing. (emphasis mine)

Considering how dumb their reasoning has been so far for the program itself, that judge is in for his best laugh in years…

tags: US+senate, Bush, NSA, US+Constitution]]>