Hillary Clinton threatens new orgy of war crimes in Iran

Some of us listened to Barack Obama pull back from his dovish stance during the general election, and we are not surprised that his administration has taken on more martial tones than expected.  Many, however, are surely taken aback by some of the hawkish declarations coming out of the new administration, and certainly many more still haven’t caught on.  These developments were all but a guarantee, given the appointments of people like Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emmanuel.  

The latest installment in America’s long nightmare of death and destruction comes from Hillary Clinton, who indicated a strong possibility that Iran could be attacked if it fails to dismantle what it says is a peaceful nuclear energy program.  Anti-war has the story.  

There is a grave error in the thinking of the Americanist war machine rhetoric, and that is that since “we” are “good,” we can have nuclear weapons, and that since “they” are “bad,” they cannot.  (This assumes, of course, that this is what they’re really doing with their nuclear energy.)  There is in this, of course, mountainous dungheaps of hubris.  More relevant, however, is the complete blindness to human nature in general, the idea that somehow “we,” the “good guys,” know how to handle our deadly weapons and will never make a tactical or ethical blunder (cough, cough), but “they”, the “bad guys,” would be so much worse than we are.  Human error applies to the enemy, but it does not apply to us.  Evil is in our enemy, but it is not in us.  This kind of Americanist fundamentalism keeps the world sufficiently stirred up so that politicians and weapons makers never have to worry about genuine peace and happiness putting them out of business.  

Near the end of this blog, Jason Ditz rightly asks how the Obama Administration thinks it could possibly handle yet another war with two already going on.  I must wonder:  Will the American government count on Israel to take care of Iran?  Won’t that spark a regional war, and won’t that make our situation even far more precarious than it is now?  Or will the collectivists on the Left and the Fascists on the Right get together and reinstitute the draft, stealing baby-faced young men from their mothers in order to go die in a desert while doing the bidding of a couple of greedy oligarchs?  

Why can’t the government just admit that for a century it has been screwing up the world, making the world safe for tyranny (Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollah, Hussein) with its wars of foreign aggression?  The world would be much safer if the American Empire admitted its mistakes and vowed to work toward employing a new grand discourse.  The position of governments, however, would be much more precarious, since the State thrives on making people fearful, which convinces them that they need a paternal protector.  As Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State.”  We could turn that around and say that peace is the health of humanity.

Mars, the Bringer of War

I was reading yet another story about the shaky relationship between the U.S. and North Korea, when Gustav Holst’s Mars started on my iPod.  How appropriate!  Check it out.

Alan Greenspan’s comedy of hubris

A few years ago I was milling about—I think it was at an airport—with nothing to do while I waited for someone or something.  I hadn’t brought any reading material with me, so I wandered into one of those junk book stores that terminals have, filled with just enough material to keep the mind occupied for an hour or so.  On this particular day I found Bob Woodward’s book Maestro, which is all about Alan Greenspan.  Written in the early parts of this decade, the book does not cover the last few years of Greenspan’s tenure at the central bank.  

When I first tried to read the book, it bored me to tears, so it was consigned to a box in a spare room of my apartment, where it languished for years.  Until recently.  I began using this book, which is, despite its subject matter, light reading, for bed-time reading early this spring, and in a flourish of activity I finished it early this weekend.  

Parts of it are fascinating—Greeenspan’s advice to Bill Clinton to reduce the deficit, for instance.  (Perhaps this brings another irony to Rush Limbaugh’s deficit spending sensitivity ribbon, which was made by folding a dollar bill.  Given inflation, if Limbaugh were to pull this same stunt today, he’d have to use a five dollar bill.)  Other parts of the book are maddening.  Pages of this volume mention one act of central planning hubris after another, with nary a word about how the oligarchs suppose that their magic potions help the economy.  Greenspan is lauded for orchestrating a “soft landing” in the early 90′s, but really this was dumb luck, and given some of the other things that happened in that decade (the .com burst, for instance), one can hardly call him an unmitigated miracle worker.  

Then, near the end of the book, on p. 210, there’s a real laugh, a quote which sums up the foolishness of the Fed, and the irony is that none of the main players, nor the author, seem to perceive the power of this sentence.  The two thuds you hear are the truth about central banking bouncing off of the foreheads of Greenspan and Woodward.  The money quote (slightly abridged for clarity, and yes…pun intended):  ”What the hell did interest rates mean if you couldn’t buy or sell at those rates?”

This dates from the late 90′s, after the troubles in the Asian markets and with a few American companies, as well.  The stock market had come to a standstill because of unfavorable interest rates, and all the “geniuses” at the Fed stood around scratching their heads.  The laugh here is that anyone who understands economics sees how simple this problem really was:  the market was not allowed to set the rates naturally.  Instead, we have a secretive board in an ivory tower who sets the interest rates.  Money is not allowed to have a market price the way fish or milk has a market price.  

In a sense, having a board set interest rates is a lot like price controls in general.  It screws up the rules of supply and demand, and it screws the consumer first, of course.  The oligarchs count on people thinking that they need a degree in economics to understand all this, but it is really simple, and common sensical.  

For good summaries of the malodorous effects of the Federal Reserve, one might wish to consult Ron Paul’s Gold, Peace, and Prosperity, as well as Murray Rothbard’s The Case Against the Fed.