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Add to that the systematic use of torture at the hellhole prisons with names now well-known and many others around the world the CIA and military run or "rendition" victims to so they can learn how American justice works. It's the same way it worked in Nazi Germany and under all other regimes run by tyrants. Victims have no rights and can be treated any way their oppressors choose. International laws that are the supreme law of the land are quaint and ignored, the notion of innocent unless or until proved guilty is a nonstarter, and knowing torture isn't an effective way to break resistance and obtain credible information hardly matters. When you're the world's only superpower, can decide alone what's lawful or not, and are on the rampage, who'll be brave or foolish enough to challenge you? Few, in any, dare.Is Justice Possible in A World Where Might Makes Right
The rule of law is sacred and should protect us from oppression and injustice. It doesn't because a greater force prevails - the power of the strong over the weak, to write the laws it wants and ignore all others, to recklessly pursue its ends, to pillage and plunder because it can get away with it. It's called the law of might makes right, ruled by the code of victors' justice where only the vanquished are held to account and no one has rights except the powerful who make their own. It's a world of lawlessness, disorder and endless conflict, our world, and it's brought to us by a rogue superpower posing as a model democratic state. Those under its oppressive heel, now and in the past, know it well. For many of them it's the curse of having too much of a valued natural resource the US wants to control and exploit. It was true for Iraq and is no different for Iran and Venezuela that also are on the US target list.
It never should have been this way nor was it intended to following WW I. Because of the frightening horror from that conflict, 63 nations, including the US, were signatories to the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 that renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy and said never again. The Pact failed to prevent WW II that began 11 years later nor has the UN formed in its aftermath been able to do be any more successful. This world body was established to maintain international order and security and to develop friendly relations among nations to strengthen universal peace. Its stated mission in its Charter was that it was to be an international body "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind." It hasn't done it and never will as long as it's a wholly owned subsidiary of the reigning superstate (aka predator) that co-opts it to serve its interests and prevents it from functioning as it should. What can all humanity look forward to if the institutions established to protect us don't work, and the only rule of law is the one of the jungle and survival of the fittest and most powerful. More on this below.
A Possible Hidden Economic Connection to the Iraq War and Future Ones Planned
The clear connection to the Iraq war, and likely ones in some form planned against Iran and Venezuela, is the ocean of oil each country literally floats on. Saddam became a target for regime change when he refused to submit and cede control of it to the US demanding he do it. Now the Iranian mullahs and its President Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez may be next in our target queue for the same reason. Like Iraq, with only conventional weapons for defense, these two countries are no match militarily against an all out US assault unlike North Korea that may have a nuclear deterrent giving that country a degree of invulnerability only states with that type weapon have against an aggressive superpower. The US picks its targets judiciously, and like a schoolyard bully never attacks an adversary that can put up a decent fight - at least by its military.
There also may be another motive behind our belligerence besides the clear oil related one. It's much less visible, not discussed, and well concealed beneath the radar. It relates to the notion believed by some economists that flawed and/or out of date methodologies are used to compute some of our key economic data like the gross domestic product (GDP), the total employment and unemployment figures known as the monthly jobs report, and the federal deficit. The reasoning goes that if the unemployment rate today was computed by the same methodology used during The Great Depression when it rose to 25% of the working population, the true current figure would be about 12% instead of the reported 4.7% which includes part-time workers and anyone working as little as one hour during the reporting period. It also excludes all those who wish to work but have stopped looking (discouraged workers) because they can't find any.
A cover story just out in the September 25 issue of Business Week magazine lends credence to the notion that official published government data is manipulated and flawed to look better than, in fact, it is. The article is titled: "What's Really Propping Up The Economy." It states since 2001, all newly created private sector jobs (1.7 million) came from one source - the health care industry which includes the drug companies and insurers offering health insurance. This one industry today represents 12% of the workforce and $2 trillion in annual spending (about one-sixth of the nation's GDP and growing). The story goes on to explain that without the private sector jobs from this one source "the nation's labor market would be in a deep coma" so that while some other sectors like construction and areas related to it added 900,000 jobs since 2001, that gain was offset by "the pressures of globalization and new technology (that) have wreaked havoc on the rest of the labor market" resulting in factories closing and shrinkage in other areas. Even information technology, "the great electronic promise of the 1990s," turned into a bust as far as its ability to generate new jobs. Instead of creating any, it lost 1.1 million of them since 2001 and now employs fewer people than in 1998 "when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear."
This kind of data doesn't reflect a healthy, expanding economy and clearly is a strong indication of one showing very disturbing signs. The current situation is still further complicated by a failing policy of imperial overreach, massive and out-of-control federal deficits discussed below, and the greatest housing boom in history that propped up the economy, became a bubble, and is now unwinding and likely to become painful before it ends. Just how much and how fast won't be known until a future time when an assessment is made of the amount of damage done and what economic conditions are in its wake. It may show things to be lots different than the rosy way they're portrayed now by most analysts.
It may be why at least one economist (maybe an honest one) believes a more accurate calculation of the real GDP indicates it's contracting and not expanding in a healthy fashion as is now reported each quarter. And most disturbing of all is an analysis of the federal deficit, the computation of which has been miscalculated since the Johnson administration began using accounting gimmicks to hide the true costs of the Vietnam war. If the deficit were calculated based on GAAP methodology (the accounting rules required of all publicly traded corporations in preparing their financial statements), the true figure would have been $665 billion for fiscal year 2003 and $760 billion for 2005 instead of the reported $375 billion 2003 figure and $318 billion for 2005. But that greater figure expands to an astonishing $3,700,000,000,000 ($3.7 trillion) for 2003 and a similarly frightening one for 2005 if the annual increase in the net amount of unfunded Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government pension obligations are included. This shadow deficit has been mounting since the Johnson years and shows that the US government in fiscal year 2003 had a negative net worth of $34,000,000,000,000 ($34 trillion) by one estimate.
Another economist paints an even grimmer picture than the one above. That economist, Boston University Professor Laurence Kotlikoff, prepared a recent detailed report for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in which he stated, by some measures, the US is already bankrupt and unable to pay its creditors (the ones holding its debt instruments and due its entitlement payments). Professor Kotlikoff wrote that a country's solvency depends on its ability to honor its lifetime fiscal obligations which are the difference between all required future spending and the revenue expected to be received to do it. That gap will widen exponentially as the accumulated US sovereign and other debt obligations plus the amount of revenue needed to cover the bill for retiring Baby Boomers' unfunded liabilities of social security, medicare, medicaid, government pensions and all else rises to an incomprehensible and unmanageable $65,900,000,000,000 ($65.9 trillion) by the calculations he used from a study by two other professors. Professor Kotlikoff explained this figure is over five times the current US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and double the national wealth. He added that if his analysis is right, it means the US is bankrupt, will face a fiscal calamity ahead and will have to default on its debt, entitlements and other obligations.
Professor Kotlikoff had more to say on this matter in a recent extended essay he wrote for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review July/August issue titled "Is the United States Bankrupt?" In it he stated that future US workers would need to be taxed at the rate of 55 - 80% over their working lifetimes to pay for the estimated $80 trillion in unfunded future entitlement liabilities or more than six times the current US GDP. Whichever of his two numbers is more accurate (if either one is), Professor Kotlikoff is beginning to be heard and is gaining some adherents. They believe the US faces a potential future fiscal meltdown even though it's understood the nation's balance sheet isn't static and includes increasing assets as well as liabilities that must be figured into any bottom line calculation of net obligations. So as dire as the current and future situation may be, the true state of the problem likely won't be known precisely until the inevitable day of reckoning arrives revealing how ugly it is.
What is known is that whichever analysis of the problem is right, the future consequences eventually will likely shake the world and change our way of life at home irrevocably at the least. So how does that relate to this country's addiction to war and the current notion of permanent or long ones. Simple. Hot wars stimulate the economy and make it grow - especially extended ones. They require lot's of spending, but so far the funding's there for them from institutional and foreign investors willing to buy our sovereign debt and the Federal Reserve always cooperative by printing up lots of ready cash. But all this comes at a price. Along with shamless tax cuts for the rich and massive corporate welfare subsidies and war-related contracts, it's caused the federal budget and current account deficits to balloon exacerbating an unmanageable fiscal problem since 2001 alone the result of George Bush's reckless policies of excess greed and imperial overreach. The latter is his new "long war" policy, and the more of them we wage, the more positive it is for the economy and corporate profits - in the short run. Without them and their spoils, the economy might not be as healthy or could even be in trouble.
So the nation may face a Hobson's choice: continue our profligate spending ways or see our fiscal house of cards collapse - a conundrum with no solution. The larger our economy gets, the more dependent it is on wars and militarism for economic stimulus. It results in more debt to get the same bang for the bucks we now spend like drunken politicians. It's an unending cycle requiring increasingly greater capital infusions without end in a sort of fiscal game of musical chairs, but one where we dare not let the music stop. Because our economy is so large, we need huge amounts of capital to maintain growth. But finding it becomes harder, and our addiction to it is like being on a treadmill we can't get off of. As a result, we may heading for an eventual day of reckoning, like the one Professor Kotlikoff envisions, no one wants to imagine or confront. It's the same problem a drug addict has needing bigger fixes for the same effect. That behavior guarantees a bad ending, eventually killing the addict. In the same way, no nation can spend and borrow beyond its means forever and always need more for the same results. Nations doing it are like out of control drug addicts and face the same unavoidable fate. They can delay the inevitable but not forever. The penalty for the sins of excess are high, painful and certain. The day eventually comes when the "piper" must be paid. It may not be next month or next year, but "pipers" are very patient and always have the final say. Richard Nixon's former chief economic advisor, Herb Stein, said it well: "Things that can't go on forever, won't." He might have added how unpleasant it is when the day of reckoning comes.
The Road to Hell Is Paved with Endless War, Its Fallout and A Future No One Wants
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