Terrorism Trial Asserts Global U.S. Jurisdiction

The conviction of British Cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri (legal name Mustafa Kamel Mustafa) for terrorism in a U.S. federal court today is not the first example of the government of the United States of America claiming the right to apply U.S. law to anyone, anywhere in the world, but it is a good example.

Consider what you would think of a court in another country (say Iran) convicting U.S. citizens of breaking Iranian law, even without leaving the U.S., or ever setting foot in Iran. Not too much, I would think. But Americans rarely conceive that our government's bullying of foreigners goes beyond all reasonable bounds.

It is not clear that Abu Masri is a terrorist. Certainly he believes people who subscribe to Islam should fight to protect Islam from attacks. Certainly his rhetoric is inflammatory.

But I want to focus on a particular problem created by his case (and prior cases like it): the assertion by the U.S. government that everyone in the world is under its jurisdiction.

What that means is that a law passed in America can be applied to anyone in the world. Talk about "taxation without representation;" this is policing without representation. This goes beyond the U.S. tradition of policing Latin America, and later the world, by assassinating national leaders or otherwise installing pro-U.S. puppets to rule countries.

The Supreme Court should throw out the entire case, but they won't.

Looking at the specifics, Abu Masri spent the entire period during which he was supposed to be a terrorist mastermind in the city of London, Great Britain. Born in Egypt in 1958, he first moved to Britain as a student in 1979. He did not leave Britain during the period during which his alleged crimes took place. Each of his alleged crimes took place outside of normal U.S. jurisdiction, the jurisdiction any non-imperialist nation would claim. After much legal wrangling Abu Masri was extradited to the U.S. on October 2012.

The main charge was that Abu Masri masterminded the kidnapping of 16 Western tourists (4 were killed) in Yemen in 1998. He was in Britain at that time. One of his sons was in Yemen, and may have been involved in the kidnapping, but was in a Yemen jail at the time. Suppose Masri was involved. Where did the crime take place? In Yemen. Which government has jurisdiction? Yemen. Case closed. The U.S. has no jurisdiction. Send Masri to Yemen, where I believe they have the death penalty for murder.

The charge closest to home is that followers of Abu Masri attempted to establish a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon. But this was 1999, before the attack on the World Trade Center, and the training was to fight against the (pro-Soviet) Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Since we have the right to bear arms, and again Masri was in Britain, this seems like the kind of case setting a precedent to arrest anyone (in the U.S. and in the world) bearing arms that the government does not like. The U.S. might have jurisdiction over anyone actually in Oregon, but not over the guy in London.

Finally, there is the charge of recruiting (speaking in favor of) young Islamic males to go fight with the Taliban and al Qaeda. That means fighting against U.S. troops. What this judgment seems to say is that it is against the law for anyone, anywhere, to even think about fighting U.S. troops. Tell it to the Viet Cong. Tell it to American Indians. Tell it to the Canadians of 1812. We can kill you, and you can't fight back. No one can fight or bear arms without the permission of the President of the United States.

See what people mean by the term Imperial Overreach?

If someone walked up to Mr. Masri and shot him in the head, I would not take offense. It is the idea that U.S. courts have jurisdiction over everyone in the world that is just plain crazy.

It is a bad precedent, too, because the Superpower status of the U.S. is rapidly slipping away. The U.S. government is bankrupt. Already the wiser people in the U.S. government are trying to cut the fat out of the military budget, only to be hamstrung but corrupt members of Congress.

Will some foreign nation arrest George W. Bush, Barack Obama and crew for war crimes and crimes against humanity, once the U.S. collapses (maybe not full chaotic collapse, but certainly loss of superpower status)? Will some nation declare it is illegal to criticize them in the U.S.? Will the U.N. start bossing us around?

Let's stick to the traditional system. A nation's jurisdiction ends at its borders. Americans don't want to be bossed around by other nations, and other nations don't like being bossed around by the U.S.

Peace Through Poverty: The Pentagon's New Budget

Today the Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is announcing the the Department of Defense will deal with a shrinking budget largely by reducing the number of paid soldiers, with additional cuts coming from some weapons programs. He would not be doing that if President Barack Obama had not signed off on the ideas. Congress will, as usual, muck with the plan, as each Representative and Senator tries to protect military spending inside his or her district, no matter how at odds with the Pentagon's plans. [See 2015 DoD budget speech transcript]

Bit picture, the ability of the U.S. to bully the other nations of the world will decrease. Bullying will be more selective. We will keep all 11 aircraft carriers, which are great for threatening or bombing nations that don't toe the American line, if they border an ocean. We won't have enough soldiers to easily invade and control large countries like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We should not need too. Imperialism was all fine and good from an economic, if not an ethical, standpoint, during the 20th century. But times have changed. Imperialism is a money loser. The U.S. has proven in the 21st century that it is quite capable of losing all the money it needs to domestically, without loosing even more abroad.

Anyone who does not understand that new roads and bridges in Afghanistan means potholes and collapsing bridges in the U.S. needs an economics course.

In the short run, at least, the American economy continues to recover from the deep dip of 2009. Unfortunately the nation already had a multi-trillion dollar national debt in 2000. Starting in 2002 the national deficit exploded to pay for the "war on terror," and despite that the economy nearly collapsed in 2008, due to the greed and stupidity of—admit it—not just Congress and Bush and Banks and mortgage brokers, but also relatively ordinary Americans who bought vastly overpriced McMansions and bungalows and ordinary track homes and condominiums. In other words, the same idiots, I mean citizens, who elect our Congress and Presidents.

Then in 2009 massive deficit spending began to try to revive the economy, keep people from starving, and prevent a rebellion. The result was a $17 trillion national deficit by the end of 2013. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates extraordinarily low, meaning the interest on the national debt was minimal, like those low-interest introductory mortgage offers of 2005.

As bits of the debt come due for payment the Treasury Department issues new debt. Unless the economy fails to revive, interest rates will rise. Short term debt pays the least interest, but is risky because it has to be renewed often. Long-term debt is safe once placed, but pays much higher interest. As I write this essay 3 month federal debt pays 0.043% per year, zero for practical purposes. 30 year debt pays 3.71%. 2 year debt pays 0.33%.

What the President and Pentagon are acknowledging is that as the average interest rate paid on U.S. debt increases, the amount of tax dollars available for all spending, including military spending, is going to decrease. 1% of $17 trillion is $170 billion. 5% is $850 billion. 10% is $1.7 trillion. Higher interest rates leave politicians 3 options: higher taxes to pay them, lower spending to pay them, or just taking on even more debt, no matter what the interest rate.

Wars and military spending no longer stimulate the economy.

World War II stimulated the depression-era economy, but initial conditions were different back then. There was little national debt when the depression began. The war started in Europe, resulting in a couple of years of peace during which the U.S. could sell anything it could make without actually being in the war.

Iraq and Afghanistan, in contrast, were pure expense for the American taxpayer. They drained the U.S. economically the same way World War II drained the British Empire. That empire, despite its size, fell apart in the 1950s. The Brits could not afford it any longer.

America can no longer afford an empire. Expect that it will be easier for regimes independent of the U.S. to prosper in the future. Expect sane U.S. Presidents (if there were such a thing) to be very careful before committing U.S. fighters to combat in large numbers. If a President wants to both keep up the economy and a military capable of defending U.S. territory, he won't want any international adventures further draining our empty coffers.

U.S. propagandists will probably come up with a better slogan for the new policy than "Peace through Poverty." But that is the era we appear to be heading into.

Dutch Bicycles, Netherlands Imperialism, and Overpopulation

Doubtless following up on stories first published in the Netherlands, the New York Times reported in The Dutch Prize Their Pedal Power ... [June 20, 2013] that there are so many bicycles in Amsterdam that they are a major problem. They outnumber cars 4 to 1. Finding room to park the bikes is a problem.

Memory refresh: The Dutch are citizens of The Netherlands, which are also known as Holland, although technically Holland is only part of the Netherlands. To the south is Belgium, to the east Germany, and the North Sea separates it from England.

The Netherlands encompasses only 16,000 square miles, but has a population of near 17 million, or over 1000 people per square mile. It is a wealthy country, with the world's 17 largest economy. GDP (gross domestic product) per person is around $46,000.

Rather than focusing on how an "ecological" solution like bicycles can become a problem, start with the more interesting question: how did the Netherlands get so rich?

There is no doubt the modern Dutch are industrious. So are a lot of people's who are nowhere near as rich as the Dutch. What else made the difference?

In the 1400's the Dutch elite was already prospering through trade, capital accumulation, and the creation of a flexible financial system. They were not a prosperous, however, as the elites of Turkey, India, China and the other truly rich nations of that era. They were also ruled by larger nations: by Burgundy until 1477 and then by Spain, followed by an 80-year long war for independence. Despite the war, perhaps partly because of it, traders and capitalists in the Netherlands prospered.

Around the same time the Spanish were exploring and conquering the Americas, the Portuguese opened trade routes around Africa to India and East Asia. The Portuguese were better at pillaging than trading, and relied on Italian banks for financing their tiny trading fleets. The Dutch merchants took a look at that trade, built a much larger fleet (they had much more capital to invest) and went out to trade and plunder.

During the 1600's the Dutch brought the riches (traded and raided) of Asia to Europe. The Dutch established a small empire, but emphasized creating trading centers over large-scale colonization.

Eventually, in the 1700's, with their larger populations and equally piratical appetites the French and English caught up with the Dutch and surpassed them. The Dutch empire stopped expanding and they lost bits and pieces of it to other imperialists. They did maintain the Dutch East Indies and were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan until 1854.

The decline in colonizing efforts did not turn the Netherlands into a backwater. The Dutch had large industries including shipbuilding. They had excellent scientists and scholars. But their key edge over rivals was finance capital. Amsterdam was the place to go to borrow money if you could not raise it in your own markets. The Dutch often cooperated with British merchants, but they also financed the American Revolution. As the world changed they moved money around, at interest, and just kept growing wealthier.

The idea that The Netherlands was some peace-loving nation trampled on by Germans in World Wars I and II is only half-true. They were a war-loving nation with a long history of abusing weaker peoples outside of Europe. During World War II the Japanese liberated or granted independence to many nations that had become colonies (including the U.S. colony, the Philippines). Thus the Dutch East Indies became Indonesia. But the Dutch tried to used force to take back the colony between 1945 and 1949.

While they were killing Indonesians, the Dutch also had a baby boom after World War II. Capital was put back to work, so the economy expanded rapidly as well.

In a global context The Netherlands is not all that important today. The number of bicycles in Holland are dwarfed by the number of bicycles in China. But on a per-person basis the Dutch consume bigger pieces of the world's pie than most global inhabitants. They have their claws in industry and agriculture around the globe. There is no ill-intent involved. You are probably reading this using a computer made with semiconductor chips made with vastly expensive machines designed and made in the Netherlands (then shipped to Taiwan).

If you are among the globally well-off, whether in China or the United States or wherever, a similar analysis can be applied to you. You may be smart and work hard, but the real secret of your success is your access to finance capital. Your intentions may be good, but you are destroying the earth.

We need to return the human population of the earth to a sustainable level. I support policies that further that goal, including women's reproductive rights and reworking the tax code to discourage families with more than one child.

Late Stage Imperialism, Class, and America's Future

"Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail
And there is no sin but to be rich;"
—William Shakespeare, King John, Act II

I was an infant in the late 1950's, and in the early 60's I was sure the world was about to end. I lived in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis. If that were not bad enough, I was still a pre-teen when I heard predictions that even if there were no nuclear war, there would be an ecological crisis that would surely destroy civilization.

Half a century later the nuclear weapons are still at the ready. The world's population has climbed, species have disappeared, and global warming has been added to the potential ingredients for catastrophe.

In the seventies I hoped for a political revolution in the U.S. with the working class coming out on top, but not led by a dictator. When I graduated from college the world was deep in recession. Jobs were hard to come by, so I took ones that no one else in their right mind wanted. I sure as hell would rather have starved as a bum than move back in with my parents. But even at minimum wage, even at part time, I could get by on my own, often living in a group house with a bunch of roommates.

For a few years it has been obvious that the U.S. economy is in trouble, and with a kind of trouble that no political party wants to admit to. The trouble is in history itself, and history cannot be changed, nor can politicians or most citizens face it honestly. The trouble is complex, but not so complex that it cannot be outlined in this essay. The solutions offered by the main political parties (and the wings within these parties) are not going to work, because they refuse to admit to the essential features of the problems facing us. I include here the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Green Party, and Libertarian Party.

Let's just suppose you want to know what is going on, even though you won't be able to do anything about it, because 300 million of your fellow American citizens are wandering around a circus of mirrors, wondering why good times are getting scarcer no matter how hard they pray to Jesus, Keynes, Ayn Rand or Rachel Carson.

Most Americans today think Brits are a cutely accented people with a very sweet Queen leading them in High Tea. But from roughly 1500 until shortly after World War II the Brits ran the largest, most brutal, most barbaric empire in global history. Which brings us to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR.

Imbued with schooling in the Latin classics, even before the American Revolution some members of our ruling class longed to be the center of a new, global empire. FDR today is beloved by Democrats and hated by Republicans for New Deal economic policies and bureaucracies that never die, but that was and is a side show. FDR's true importance was that he fulfilled the imperialist dreams of the founding fathers.

FDR was quite clever. He had learned much from his uncle, former President Teddy Roosevelt, and from the architect of modern American and global racism, President Woodrow Wilson. FDR served as Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913 to 1920), which traditionally was the front-line post for U.S. imperialist plotting. From uncle Teddy he learned how to prepare to take advantage of a situation, and from uncle Woodrow he learned how to wait until other imperialist powers were exhausted fighting each other before committing American troops.

Hence, Britain, Germany, and Russia bombed each other's factories pretty well before Japan finally recognized a war that already existed (American soldiers were fighting Japanese soldiers in China before Pearl Harbor) and forced FDR's hand. FDR had already been building a vast armada to invade China and Japan, but much of it was sunk at the Battle of Pearl Harbor. With ten times the industrial capacity of Japan and with Communist Russia having already stopped the German advance, it was mainly a matter of time and willingness to spill blood to capture Germany, China and Japan before the Red Army could.

Russia did pretty well during World War II, but the British Empire collapsed. So did the Dutch Empire (did you even know the Netherlands had a empire, also know for its cruelty to natives?) and the French Empire. But in all the world only one nation had not lost a single factory to bombs. It was the United States of America. Thank you FDR.

In 1946 everyone wanted American food and other aid, and so no one could afford to set protective tariff barriers against U.S. goods. U.S. factories and corporations went wild. We took over French and British colonial puppet governments by offering them higher bribes than their old oppressors could. We lost China and Eastern Europe to communism, but by 1950 the effective American Empire was larger than the British Empire had ever been.

Working class Americans benefited. Corporations could be generous to newly-recognized unions because profits were flooding in from all over the world. Still remembering the Depression, workers and business people alike worked hard to push Prosperity to greater heights. Almost everyone (except for some oppressed minority groups) could own a suburban home, a car or two, a television, telephone, stereo, lawnmower, and the usual furnishings. College education became the rule, not the exception.

The Unions attributed prosperity to their forcing the Bosses to pay higher wages; they did not want to look at imperialism. The Business guys (this was pre-feminism) attributed prosperity to the Free Markets and their own cleverness. They did not want to look at imperialism. The Democratic Party and Republican Parties did not want to look at imperialism's effects on the American economy, they just wanted credit for prosperity. Within the U.S. everyone could agree that U.S. global dominance was a kind, protective sort of dominance. Our dictators were good men who were protecting their people from the horrors of Communism. We sent aid packages to show our benevolence. Anything said to the contrary was Communist propaganda.

The only people who talked about imperialism were the American Communists. Until around 1960 they were almost all in the Communist Party U.S.A., a pro-Stalin organization, and few people listened to them. In the 1960's a bunch of smaller communist, anarchist, and socialist groups thrived for a while, but they mostly collapsed after the end of the Vietnam War, and with them any analysis of imperialism.

Meanwhile, due to improvements in medicine and agricultural science, the human population of the world mounted rapidly. It was great for business. Each newly added human was a consumer and potential worker.

New trends emerged between 1970 and 2010 that gradually changed the global balance of power. The U.S., although defeated in Vietnam, maintained much of its economic empire and military clout, but was unable and uninterested in overtly conquering the entire world even after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and its allied regimes. But the most important trend was re-industrialization both inside and outside the Empire, and a coincidental relative de-industrialization of the U.S. It was simple: producing profits became easier outside the U.S. than within as each decade passed.

Global industrialism, including mechanization of agriculture, has led to the degradation of the environment almost everywhere, but most notably in China. With China now trying hard to clean up its own environment, and labor costs rising, the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy is already slowing down. Other nations will absorb most new factories that are built to serve the global economy.

Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party is willing to tax our non-American subjects to pay for the costs of imperialism. The U.S. federal budget is now in perpetual deficit, yet domestic government services are rapidly disintegrating. Almost all union workers now are government employees. Even the agricultural sector is under constant attack by drought, roundup-ready weeds, global warming, and symptoms like honeybee colony collapse.

The problem is not just that the Democrats and Republicans are deadlocked in Congress, resulting in a do-nothing government. The problem is that even if one party had its way, its solutions would not work. None of the solutions on the table are designed to work to revive a late-stage imperialist economy. Just like nothing the British did could revive their economy as their empire collapsed between 1945 and 1960. The world went on, and eventually the British adjusted, but they were no longer the world's richest rich people with the world's best paid workers.

The first real decision to be made is whether to maintain the empire, downsize it, or abandon it. From a purely economic viewpoint, each option has its merits. Maintaining the empire would work if we admitted we run an empire and imposed substantial taxes on our foreign subjects. Downsizing would work if we could shuck the most expensive and indefensible subjects, but even with a smaller military we would still need impose taxes. If nations rebelled against the taxes, we would probably have to abandon them.

Abandoning the entire empire would likely work out best in the long run, but it also abandons the easy fix of taxing our subjects. Today we still have very significant industrial, agricultural, and educational capacity in the 50 states (I am assuming Puerto Rican independence is an economic no-brainer). As bad as our natural environment is, it is in better shape than that of many other nations. Yet in international competition we have few advantages because of the stupidity of our business class and legacy costs of imperialism (the national debt).

We would still need to either decide on a national course. How can every person capable of work be given a productive role in a post-imperialist scenario? I don't think the welfare-state model, in which more of the pie is doled out to the indolent, can lead to anything but further decline. The goal of full and productive (as opposed to make-work) employment could be achieved within a democratic and largely free-market framework if the government would show a bit of backbone when necessary. Local, State, and federal government should be free to set up businesses as needed to address needs underserved by existing businesses. After an incubation period the ownership of such businesses should be transferred to the employees of the businesses.

It is absolutely essential, however, that the U.S. reduce its population. There cannot be prosperity for all on a limited supply of natural resources when the population keeps climbing, or even at the current level. This policy would doubtless include economic guidance. I would advocate free public education only for 2 children per family, and no tax deductions beyond the 2nd child either. If only a few people have more than 2 children, enough women will have no or only one children, and the population should trend to long-term sustainable levels.

Of course, I know this won't happen. The working class of the U.S. is as infected with fantasies as the capitalist class and the middle class. The leaders of the working class, middle class, and capitalist class are clueless. They were deceived by the easy fruits of imperialism. Those fruits are disappearing. Instead of waking up and learning how to plant an orchard, Americans demand that the fruit just keep appearing on the table. And politicians give them what they demand: pipe dreams.

President Obama Grabs Yemen

There is a new star in the U.S. imperial firmament: Yemen.
 
According to local Yemeni journalists some 200 armored vehicles filled with U.S. Marines arrived in Sanaa, the capital, on Friday and Saturday. U.S. President Barack Obama sent them there following an angry protest against the American Embassy on Thursday in which the Marines already protecting the embassy killed four protestors and injured another 48.

Anti-American feelings in Yemen were already high from years of U.S. meddling in the well-watered, mainly agricultural nation at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. has backed unpopular leaders and carried on a war against rebels using armed flying drones. The deadly demonstration at the embassy was touched off by recent release of the anti-Islam film that in Yemen is also being attributed to Israel. The film was actually made by a former Egyptian Coptic Christian living in the United States.

In contrast to the "invitation" from U.S. puppet President Abd Rubbuh Mansur Al-Hadi, the democratically elected Yemeni Parliament voted against allowing the Marines to enter the country. Their statement said "We do not accept any foreign forces in Yemen, be it small or big forces, and for any reason." At the same time Parliament demanded that Al-Hadi protect all foreign embassies in the nation. Parliament also condemned the film. [As reported by Yemen Observer]

The Yemeni military and police have more than adequate forces available to keep the U.S. embassy safe in Yemen. So why did President Barack Obama send in the Marines?

It may be just an election year ploy, as Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of being weak on imperialism, despite Obama's vast expansion of the "war against terror" during his administration.

Yemen has long been considered a valuable asset by the world's Great Powers. Only a couple of decades ago the British Empire and Communist Bloc were still fighting over it. A long, bloody rebellion convinced the British to leave and the Soviets gave up when the U.S.S.R. collapsed. [See history of Yemen]
 
Yemen has been torn by internal conflict, but that should not be the business of the U.S. If Yemen can't keep ambassadors safe, the U.S. could communicate through neutral countries like Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. invasion of Yemen is likely to expand, not be reversed. Get ready for another long, bloody, and largely pointless war.

History has taught the wise that it is easy to send troops into nations like Yemen, but it is difficult to extract them. Such deployments create greater anti-American sentiments and sap our national economy. Yemen is divided and suffering from a multi-party civil war. The U.S. might buy the allegiance of one or more factions, but the people of Yemen have a history of uniting against foreign intervention even as they fight each other.
President Obama is weak, but not for the reasons given by Mitt Romney. He is too weak to resist the bad advice of the security state that increasingly runs America. He continues to prop up corrupt regimes (including neighboring Somalia and Saudi Arabia) and meets protests with bullets.

Obama's tactics will fail in Yemen just as they have failed everywhere. This nation needs new leadership, and its own renewal of democracy. That does not appear possible under the current two-party regime.

Tax the American Empire

[Note: much of this article first appeared as Post-Imperial Mendocino County at MendoDay.com]

The American economy, the economic crisis of 2008, and ongoing sluggish growth, cannot be understood without first admitting that we are in a post-imperialist era.

We cannot move the economy forward again without getting out of the double-bind we are in: paying for the trappings of imperialism, without its economic benefits.

The federal government's budget is still deeply in deficit mode, yet has not provided enough stimulus to get us up to even moderate growth. So we are not really out of the crisis that swept over us starting in 2008. Food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits have staved off starvation for most citizens, but hardly amount to a long-term solution.

The idea that the United States of America ever went through an imperialist period will surprise many of its citizens. Imperialism often implies an emperor, but in our case it mainly means being able to extract wealth from foreign nations through the exercise of military and economic power.

There was no clear beginning to U.S. imperialism. Grabbing native American Indian lands was a major way of extracting wealth from outsiders even before 1776. Most historians would say modern U.S. imperialism started with the Spanish-American War in which the U.S. grabbed Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba (we later sort of gave Cuba to its local elite, although the process was not really completed until Fidel Castro came to power). Or you could go back to the Mexican-American War, in which we grabbed the northern half of Mexico.

To understand how we might revive the economy and government, we should focus on U.S. imperialism after World War II. How did we get to that happy situation? From 1929 until just before World War II the United States economy was pretty sleepy . By the late 1940s and into the 1950s the U.S. economy was bustling. Why did World War II make such a difference?

The United States has had some pretty clever leaders. Even in the 1700's many of them wished for our nation to be a Great Power like the British Empire or France. Presidents like James Polk (who grabbed California), William McKinley (Spanish-American War) and Theodore Roosevelt came to symbolize U.S. global ambitions.

It was World War I, by accident or strategy, that became the template for future U.S. success. Under President Woodrow Wilson the U.S. stayed out of the war, selling all the goods our farms and factories could produce to both sides. Then, when Russia had collapsed and Italy, Germany, France and England were exhausted, the President, under pressure from U.S. bankers, found a pretext to declare war.

It was great, World War I. Not that many American soldiers died (just 117,000), but we tipped the balance for Great Britain and France. Germany was defeated. We did not grab any territory to speak of, but we became the world's bankers while leading the world in industry.

The rematch known as World War II went even better. President Franklin Roosevelt rearmed the United States while putting the British Empire even more heavily in our debt. We let the Communists defeat the Nazis and, again, came in towards the end to claim victory and its spoils. English, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Russian factories had been largely destroyed by aerial bombardment. In contrast the U.S. had built many more factories.

As the French and British empires collapsed after the war it was U.S. factories that supplied the goods for most of the world. In the U.S., in the 1950's, most Americans who wanted one could get a job that paid well. An interstate highway system was built, suburbs were built, colleges expanded and filled. The whole imperialist deal was so profitable that even though the U.S. maintained what was by far the world's most expensive military establishment, paying for it detracted little from the economy.

The Sixties were even better, with John F. Kennedy (a Democrat) engineering the biggest tax cuts for the rich in American history. Even those Americans whose race, geographical location, or just plain laziness and incompetence had prevented them from sharing in The American Dream were soon helped by President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society social programs.

The prosperity might have gone on for centuries, but America's capitalists betrayed it. Rival gangs of capitalists pursued opportunities that turned imperialism on its head. It was profitable to keep costs for consumers high in the U.S. It became more profitable to produce the goods sold in the U.S. in other sectors of the world, certain of the "third world" nations like Mexico and Korea, then later China and Brazil. Meanwhile another gang clung to the profits of the military-industrial complex, and even added profits by whipping up a Homeland Security spending bonanza.

As a result American military, homeland security, and domestic budgets had to be skimmed from a thinning layer of middle-class taxpayers. The capitalists received tax cuts, notably special treatment for dividends and capital gains, as well as no taxes on financial transactions. Factory workers, most of them, dropped back into the proletariat, losing their middle-class incomes. Low-paid service work came to make up most of the American economy.

In classic imperialism, as say run by the British Empire from about 1700 to about 1950, the economic idea is to extract wealth from the enslaved nations. The extracted wealth is brought home, and while the rich get most of it, enough is trickled down to the middle class and proletariat to keep them happy and patriotic, or at least not rebellious. It is important to keep the cost of the military used to dominate other nations low enough so there is a net, major profit for the homeland. The Brits were very good at that. They even drafted soldiers from their subject nations and used them quite effectively. The British Empire fell because England exhausted itself fighting Germany, not because the empire itself was not profitable. At the end of World War II, for practical purposes, the Brits had mortgaged their empire to American bankers. We foreclosed.

Starting in the 1990's, and accelerating this last decade, the U.S.A. has done the opposite. You can see from our Trade Deficits that wealth has been draining from the nation for two decades. At the same time we are being bled internally by the military and homeland security industries.

Look at Afghanistan. Where's the loot? We give money to the corrupt government of Afghanistan. We give them weapons. They sell the weapons to the Taliban, who then use them to shoot at U.S. troops. We get nothing out of it. Not oil, not a market for U.S. goods, not slaves or concubines or the usual imperialist loot.

There are only two solutions. One is to tax every nation in the world that we can. That is the classic imperialist solution: give unto Obama the things that are Obama's. The plan probably would not go down very well in most countries. But they would have no choice. Look what we did to Iraq, and most nations don't have the defenses Iraq did.

Taxes should be modest and imposed gradually, so as not to shock the world economy. A 1% sales or income tax on developed allies and a 0.25% to 0.5% tax on less-developed dependents would probably work for a starter. While the rate is low, by taxing some 6 billion people, quite a bit of money would flow into the United States. It would pay for our work as the world's police, and also pay for our education, welfare, bread, and circuses.

The only other solution is to Cut the Military and Homeland Securities budget. Cut it to the size needed to defend us from Mexico and Canada. Something along the size of the New York Police Force budget.
Unfortunately we are maneuvering in is a sea of continued massive stupidity by American capitalists and both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Don't expect those bozos to start taxing England, Korea and Pakistan, or to reduce the military budget in a meaningful way, in your lifetimes.

Expect America to continue to decline. As the empire unravels, our homeland will unravel. To keep military muscle, we will loose economic muscle. If we keep on this course, at some point, our colossus will fall.

Recognize Palestine

The United Nations (U.N.) is a funny place. And I don't mean ha-ha funny.

On the one hand it is as close as one can get to a recognizable global government. Therefore it makes sense for the Palestinians to ask the U.N. to recognize their existence as a nation.

On the other hand, it has most of the attributes of a bad government, and few attributes of a good government. Given its history, that should not be a surprise. The UN was, and remains, a profoundly racist institution, dedicated to maintaining the system of imperialist domination of the industrial, mainly "white race" nations over all others.

The UN had as its predecessor the League of Nations. In American history books Woodrow Wilson is almost always portrayed as the progressive peace-lover who worked to create the League of Nations, to promote world peace, only to see the U.S. Senate reject American membership in the body. That is not untrue. But Woodrow Wilson was one of the intellectual architects of racism in the United States, and the leader of the overtly racist Democratic Party. His Fourteen Points for world peace and international relations basically amounted to democracy for white people.

President Wilson effectively called for new nations based on ethnic majorities when those new nations had been part of rivals to the American, British, and French empires. For instance Poland, which did not exist as a state before World War I, was to be created out of parts of Russian and Germany. But he did not call for independent states to be carved out of any part of the American or British empire. Neither the Philippines nor Puerto Rico, both U.S. colonies, were considered nations capable of self-determination.

Japan was one of the few nations that had, at that time, escaped colonization by one of the imperialist nations (often referred to then as the Great Powers: the United States, Russia, Germany, France, the British Empire, and perhaps Italy). During negotiations Japan raised the idea that Asian peoples had a right to self-determination. That would mean the U.S., Britain, France and Holland giving up their colonies (Germany's were taken from it for losing the war). Woodrow Wilson, chairing the committee that considered that proposal, killed it. He really truly thought that only people of European descent were capable of self-government. Instead of a peaceful withdrawal of imperialists from Asia in 1920, the issue led to the Asian Anti-colonial War (always lumped by U.S. historians into World War II, to confuse the issue) and then to a series of national liberation struggles lasting into the 1970s, including the Vietnam War. [See also: The U.S. War Against Asia]

Palestine, after World War I, was not allowed national self-determination. It was removed from the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire and places in the British Empire. The British, in order to receive Jewish financial backing during World War I, had promised to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration). While there were (fluctuating degrees) of Jewish immigration into Palestine before World War II, the British never official created a Jewish state or region in Palestine.

The United Nations was a reboot of the old League of Nations, with most of its flaws. It did not call for the abolition of colonialism. It was designed expressly to give the appearance of global backing to the new British-American alliance. It was not democratic in any reasonable sense of the term, as the one-person one-vote guideline was subverted by the colonial system and other un-democratic structures. Where independent nations had been established in Asia, the UN allowed them to be re-colonized. In particular when Korea tried to become an independent nation (the Korean War) the UN voted to attack Korea. Similarly, in almost every case where it has been involved, the UN has helped strong nations attack weaker nations.

Meanwhile, back in Palestine, the Jewish section of the population threw out the British and established a state by force of arms in 1946 through 1948. Unfortunately, this was not simply a matter of making reality out of the Wilsonian rhetoric of national self-determination. It was largely a land grab and instance of ethnic cleansing, for the native Palestinians were largely thrown out with the British, by the mostly European jewish invaders. The new state of Israel made further conquests in a series of wars, leaving the Palestinians with no territory of their own. Although at first reluctant to back the tiny new state and anger the Arab states in the region, in the U.S. Jewish votes in the key states of Florida and New York, along with a vast corruption of government through election campaign donations eventually made the U.S. government the primary military and economic backer of the state of Israel.

Despite their troubles, the Palestinians have retained their national identity and have created a culture of resistance to Israeli tyranny. This week the Palestinian National Authority petitioned the United Nations to recognize the Nation of Palestine.

President Obama is too worried about getting himself re-elected with American Jewish money and votes to support Palestinian statehood. Given the anti-democratic structure of the U.N., that means the Palestinian request will be blocked by its Security Council. Based solely on a military alliance that existed during World War II, five security council seats have permanent members (the U.S., Great Britain, Russia, France, and China) with permanent veto powers. Basically, the form of the United Nations is an oligarchy bordering on dictatorship.

However, a vote in the General Assembly is likely to show that the majority of the nations of the world want to recognize Palestine as a nation, and that implies they want to see justice done for the Palestinian people.

Americans should support democracy and national self-determination, including for the nation of Palestine. The United States government should voluntarily relinquish its veto power in the U.N., along with the other permanent Security Council members.
Further, the United States of America should recognize the Palestinian state, regardless of the outcome in the United Nations. President Obama should be ashamed of his self-serving following in the footsteps of that architect of racism, Woodrow Wilson.

Bribes, Corruption and Lost Wars

Corruption, the taking of bribes by politicians and government employees and the theft of public funds, is a nearly universal practice. But it is also a spectrum, with come governments having very little corruption, and ranges to governments that exist almost exclusively. South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam) during the 1960s is noted for its high degree of corruption. It is generally agreed that government corruption was one of the main reasons the government eventually collapsed and the south was unified with North Vietnam, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

I am reading Understanding Vietnam by Nilm L. Jamiseson and a section on the cultural aspects of corruption in Vietnam explained what happened in a way I had never considered. This contrasts with other histories I read that described the corruption, but implied it was simply due to defects in human character. This new understanding also sheds light on the collapse of the Chiang Kai-Shek regime in China in the late 1940s. It also explains a lot about many of today's regimes, including, on a smaller scale, the behavior of all too many individuals in local government in these United States of America.

It fits in too with what one of my political science professors told me about the Rhode Island state legislature, back in 1974. He said the salaries of the legislators were kept low so that only wealthy businessmen or corrupt political hacks could afford to hold office. To be a full time politician, to server the people full time, elected officials needed major supplements to their incomes. Those could only come from illegal donations, diversions of campaign funds, or outright bribes.

In Vietnam (I will call South Vietnam just Vietnam from this point forward) traditional status was highly dependent on wealth. However, leaders were supposed to show their wealth by providing feasts for their villages, and through other forms of ostentation public distribution of their wealth. In a village economy men competed for status by sharing with the less fortunate. Their families had priority, of course, but it was not too bad of a system.

When the U.S. invaded (invited by puppet governments) in the 1960s the shock to the Vietnamese economy was profound. Government employees, including military employees, changed in a few years from being highly respected and decently paid members of a mainly traditional society to among the poorest citizens.

American privates had higher salaries than Vietnamese generals. For that matter, call girls whose clients were American enlisted men made more money. The influx of American money drove inflation, but while America paid for military supplies and all sorts of economic programs, no one thought to make payments to the Saigon regime to increase the salaries of soldiers and bureaucrats. High-ranking military officers would moonlight as taxi drivers to try to make enough pay to keep their families from losing face due to poverty.

Their wives came to the rescue, and that was also due to cultural traditions. In Vietnam women had traditionally done the marketing and small scale craft making that kept families afloat. Men, mostly, did not engage in business. While men went about their hierarchically controlled, government-dictated lives, women had to do more than make ends meet: they had to maintain their family's status in society. "During the late 1960s and early 1970s it was often impossible to be a dutiful and virtuous family man and a dutiful and virtuous military officer or civil servant ... his womenfolk kept reminding him that prices were up again in the market and the children needed new shoes." Women ran the free market show, which largely consisted of diverting American-donated goods into the black market. "As Madam General called Madam Colonel who called Madam Head Clerk ... the daily flow of money and of goods throughout the country was anticipated and careful plans were formulated for diverting some percentage of this bounty."

This looking deeper contrasts with A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, which is better at providing insight into the American side of the war. Americans were concerned about the corruption of Vietnamese officials and military men, but their answer was classroom training about the importance of good governance standards. That they paid their girlfriends more than they paid men they expected to die fighting communists did not seem to cross anyone's mind.

In America now there is an argument that public sector workers are paid too much, particularly because they get pensions and medical benefits far more generous than those most ordinary workers get. I think it comes down to individual cases. We want government employees to make enough money to motivate them to come to work every day, work effectively all day, and be immune to bribery. We want there to be enough employees so that the work gets done. Such a system cannot be perfected, only worked toward. We need to keep pay fair. Some want it on par with the private sector, but in the private sector fairness is not an issue. The system favors underpaying those lowest in the hierarchy and overpaying those highest on the corporate ladder. It all comes down to specifics, which vary by locality and job title.

Corruption has its own cultural momentum. Simply raising pay is not a sure way of stamping out corruption. Lowering pay somewhat is not likely to cause most honest civil servants to suddenly be selling their souls. Nevertheless, poor pay in the long run does breed corrupiton and incompetence.

A single word, corruption, encapsulates a wide variety of social pressures. Americans thought that the corruption of Vietnam was due to weak ethical values in the national culture. American soldiers did not need to steal food from peasants to fill their bellies. Their corruption was at a higher level, the corruption of an entire nation by wealth from industrial production and imperialist domination.

That era of American global economic supremacy is coming to an end. The corruption (lack of self-control and external control) of the banking sector and Wall Street almost brought the entire nation to its knees in 2008. The same gang funded Barack Obama's presidential campaign, just like they funded Clinton and Bush before him. So we have had much talk of reform, but very little reform.

Millions of people died violent deaths in Vietnam during the French and American interventions and civil war. Corruption was problem, but it was also a symptom of the larger problems of that era. The problem now is we still have an American economy and government built for imperialism. The cracks in that system will continue to widen as the imperialist overhang continues to crumble.

One Less Terrorist in The New World Order

Imagine if Russia, when it was still the Communist U.S.S.R., had sent a couple of helicopters with commando teams into U.S. territory to capture or execute a couple of U.S. sponsored "terrorists." That is, violent anti-communist militarists, which the U.S. harbored and trained on a regular basis during the Cold War. That would have been considered an illegal act of war by the U.S. It probably would have started World War III. The communists, of course, trained their own "cadre" of criminally violent political opperatives.

Symmetry, who framed thy unlawful impertinence? But even if the U.S. raid on Pakistan was illegal under international law, I see no reason to weep for Osama Bin Laden. He was a practitioner of total war, where nothing, not even the lives of women and children, was sacred. I note that total war addicts are not rare in this world. They included U.S. illuminaries such as former Presidents Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. If one war criminal kills an opposing war criminal, I don't see much bad in that.

Alas, Pakistan is not a symmetric power versus the U.S. It is a semi-dependent state in the U.S.A.'s global empire. They did not attempt to defend Osama. They would probably have captured him and sent him to the U.S. for trial if asked. The problem for the Obama administration was not that Pakistan could not be relied on. We long ago sorted out who we can and cannot rely upon to betray Pakistan if the U.S. asks. The problem was Osama Bin Laden might have decided to talk. Imagine the embarrassment for oh so many powerful families and institutions if Osama testified at his own trial, or even in depositions made available to the public.

It is arguable that Osama won before he died. How do you defeat an empire like the former U.S.S.R. or the U.S.A. if you can only lead a bunch of impoverished, poorly armed citizen soldiers? The answer was never simply to force an imperialist power to withdraw its military from the isolated failed state known as Afghanistan. The U.S.S.R. collapsed because its culture and economy collapsed. Its military was still strong when the empire crumbled. In fact, spending too much on the military and not taking care of ordinary citizens was one of the causes of the collapse of communism.

Corporate security state spokespeople like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have already made it clear that the U.S. ruling class intends to make the same mistake the U.S.S.R.'s rulers made. They are not cutting military spending now that Iraq is pacified and Osama is dead. They are not cutting back on internal security measures that feed the corporate security apparatus and starve schools, hospitals, workers and even the managerial class.

In four or five years no one in their right mind will be willing to loan the U.S. government any more money. Osama may have been a madman when it came to religion, but he grew up in the same economic circumstances of a Kennedy or a Bush. He understood business and economics. He understood bankruptcy. A bankrupt company is a powerless company, and a bankrupt nation is a powerless nation. A thousand bases scattered around the world won't be able to keep the locals in line once the money is coming from China, India, or Europe. The rulers of the British Empire learned that lesson after World War II. They should have learned it after World War I, but the British were led by obtuse people from an inbred ruling class.

Democracy with Imperialism: the British Empire

In 1500, when the Turkish Ottoman Empire and China were the world's greatest powers, before Spain had established its empire in the Americas and while the Portuguese were still pirating their way around Africa to Asia, the English were a backward and unimportant people. They had a king, Henry VII, who had come to power through violence. There were no pretensions to having a democratic government run for the sake of the people; holding Parliaments was an ancient but seldom-honored tradition.

What was the evilest empire in the history of the world? The Mongols? The Romans, the Ottomans, the Nazis? For my money it was the British Empire. Which did not exist in any meaningul sense in 1500.

We are not supposed to think that way in these United States of America. The British are supposed to be a good force of history, the main source of the American ruling class and culture, nice people who brought civilization to half the world.

Sure, that is how it must have gone. Hi, would you like to trade almost all of your land for some lessons in how to drink high tea? Welcome to English civilization.

The Brits were a brutal lot. For centuries they just fought each other or, after the Norman conquest, tried to conquer another lot of civilized brutes, the French. United, they conquered Wales, then Ireland. They fought with the Scots for centuries, too, before the two clans were united by royal marriage.

Even before the unity known as Great Britain (or United Kingdom) was formed, the English began mixing trade with piracy. Their royally sponsored pirates became national heroes and provided much of the capital for both colonialism and modern capitalism. The British Navy and Army, working with missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats, became a rather efficient imperial machine. They never did the grand invasion routine beloved by conquerors from Darius the Great to Napoleon. They used political and economic leverage quite effectively to eat the Indian subcontinent bite by bite. They would graciously accept a colony or two from bankrupt Eurotrash kings they had loaned some money or troops to for local wars, or who had lost to the tyrants backed by Britain.

It was a centuries-long process, but over time the people of the British empire murdered millions in war and in cold blood, stole half the world's real estate, and destroyed most of the native economies of their colonies. You might also ask the Irish about how civilized British rule has been.

Which brings us to the issue of democracy. During the development of the British Empire the "middle class" (here I use older, more accurate sense of the term, those above the working class but below the aristocracy) struggled for power with the kings (really Emperors) and their aristocratic inbred idiot relatives. Guess who won? Over the centuries Parliament became stronger, and the House of Commons came to prevail over the House of Lords. Eventually even ordinary, lower-class British men got the vote. Socialist parties and then, more successfully, the Labor Party came to play an important role in politics. By the 20th century, we are supposed to believe, democracy was triumphant in merry old England.

Look at World War I. We are taught in American schools that the U.S. was a democracy and fought with France, Italy, and Britain, collectively the Democracies, against Germany, Austria, and Turkey (still then the vast Ottoman Empire), the Monarchies. That is a load of swill.

Almost no one in the British Empire could vote to elect politicians to set its policies. Only those living in the British Isles could vote. Africans could not vote, nor could Indians or Burmese or the Chinese in Hong Kong. Even the Canadians and Australians could not vote for members of the British Parliament (as white neo-Brits they did have their own Parliaments).

Is that democracy? A billion or so people, and less than 100 million have a say in governance.

I think not. I somehow doubt the citizens of the Indian subcontinent would have voted to have themselves shot when they demanded independence or self-rule.

In Iran (then Persia) they still speak of the nefarious British. They have better memories than Americans, or perhaps less reason to forget what actually happened over the past five centuries.

Class room exercise questions:

Are there any parallels between the British Empire and some other benevolent empire closer to home?

If a minority like the Irish within a political empire vote for their independence, but are voted down by the English majority, is that democracy? Is majority rule the sole test of democratic governance?

Michele Bachmann's Bad Divorce

I had not paid any attention to Michele Bachmann, a Republican Congressperson, until I started seeing her mentioned as a potential nominee for President of the United States. Apparently that is because I don't watch TV. She has become quite a star for the Tea Party movement, although she began her political career long before the Tea Party was organized.

Turning to Wikipedia, I found that Congresswoman Bachmann is very close to me in age, just a little over a year younger, born April 6, 1956. I always wonder with ultra-conservative people in my age cohort how they missed the basic lessons of their childhood, of the 1960s, of peace, love, and understanding. What jumped out at me in her mini-biography is that her parents were divorced and her father moved to California; she stayed with her mother. My parents did not get divorced. Perhaps because they were Catholic and the Bachmann's were Lutheran.

Divorce is still controversial in some circles. It is another of life's double edged swords. For women, without divorce there can be the pain of being stuck in an unloving, perhaps even brutal, marriage. On the other side of the blade is that with divorce a man can make promises, have children, and then, on a whim, go off cavorting with another woman. Leaving a lonely, angry woman to raise children, and like as not trying to instill in those women a hatred for their fathers and anything to do with them. David Amble, Michele's father, moved to California (where I now live).

Michele grew up in tiny Anoka, Minnesota, essentially a suburb of Minneapolis. I grew up in the suburbs of a big, but much more conservative, city: Jacksonville, Florida. If geography means anything, I should have turned out conservative and she liberal.

Another reason for the different directions was that we were on a cusp. When we graduated from high school, I in 1972 and she in 1974, the sixties were over. Some of the energy of the sixties was still present in radical politics, in music, and in art. Feminism was really just starting to get going. I felt repressed by my parents and schools, so I wanted to taste the counterculture even if it was already in decline. By 1974, combined with hating her father and divorce, probably Michele was willing to take the opportunities now afforded women, but rejected the broader implications of ideals like freedom, equality, and mutual cooperation. After graduating from a state college she headed off to Oral Roberts University, where the miraculous is real and real problems are sins.

Finally, it would be foolish to neglect my struggles with the idea of being drafted in the U.S. military and being sent off to kill the good people of Vietnam. Michele did not have to worry about that.

Obviously Michele is smart, hard working, ambitious, and loving in her own way. On the other hand, how smart can you be and pretend that there is a God, he is male, he had only one son, he crucified his own son, and he has had writer's block since he finished penning out the New Testament? Of course, religion these days is just a fantasy-role playing game. Most people who aren't insane know that it is just make-believe.

It is too bad that the political principles of the right wing of the Republican Party and especially the Tea Party are not examined rationally, but instead are colored with religious emotionalism. Unlike my mostly lefty friends I agree about some of the economic symptoms. I see the causes differently, however. We, Americans, are in a post-imperialist decline, much like England between World War I and World War II. We benefited, from about 1938 to about 1970, from national prosperity based partly on hard work and creativity, but juiced by the super-profitability of imperialism. Our industries did great because we had the whole world for a market: every other industrial nation's factories had been extensively bombed in World War II. The economic pie was growing so fast that the rich did not fight all that hard to prevent the middle class, working class, and the poor to share in the feast.

Now we waste our money on the military aspects of imperialism, but it is an economic drag on the homeland. Our capitalists wanted and got Free Trade, which was not really about trade, but about moving American factories to Mexico and China and Central American dictatorships. Now American workers are global citizens, and they don't like it.

The pyramids of business have gotten taller. A business owner with 10 employees seldom can pay himself more than 10 times what he pays an individual employee. A global corporation with 100,000 employees can easily pay its top management 1000 times what it pays basic employees, and the stockholders can still pocket plenty of loot. For Americans in the global elite, Free Trade has been a shower of gold.

We could try, again, to divide up the pie more fairly. The easiest way to do that is to increase taxes on people with high incomes, and on capital gains and dividends. Then use that money for infrastructure (including education) that benefits everyone. It could even be used for infrastructure that would make building new factories in the United States attractive to the greed-heads who control international capital. But just dividing the pie more fairly is not going to be enough [pay attention, lazy socialist friends]. Even cutting back our military establishment 90% won't be enough. IF we are going to keep a pleasant standard of living for most Americans we need to be competitive with China and India, Brazil and Peru, Europe and Arab Emirates. That means we have to upgrade our work skills and habits, especially at the low end. The idea that the state can guarantee (what would be in the developing world) a middle-class lifestyle, is not going to be viable. With the trends coming down the road the state will be lucky if it can guarantee that if you don't work you won't starve or freeze.

I certainly think we can do better than Michele Bachmann for President. But whoever is elected, the trend lines won't change unless concerted efforts are made to change them. President Obama has increased military spending at a time it needed to be cut back by 90%. He approved an extension of the rich-ride-tax-free program of his predecessor. Except for rhetoric (aimed at voting bases) and fringe issues, I see little substantial difference between Bachman and Obama. I'm not excited about either. I hope some more exciting candidates enter the race.

Humboldt County, Localization and Imperialism

Yesterday my dear friend Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, matriarch of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, posted this on Facebook: "At SBDC's Technology Bootcamp for biz owners and one of the 1st recommendations we're getting is to outsource and hire "virtual assistants" in India for $4/hr or Georgia for $8/hr. And bonus, they can be paid as contractors - so no benefits! Hmmmm."

I have complained about outsorcing in the past, and have actually had work I did, and got paid well for, outsourced to India. But since Kaitlin already expressed that outrage, I took it to the next level, commenting: "An Internet downside for U.S. workers for sure. After 65 years of being privileged workers inside an imperialist economy, we Americans are being tossed back into the international proletariat. Who woulda thought." Lots of other people left interesting comments too.

Of course, a person could offer their services in the $4 to $8 an hour range in Humboldt County. You can't be someone's employee at that scale, it violates the minimum wage laws, but you can freelance for as little as you want. And as long as you don't get sick or have a family to support, and know how to live very frugally, you can live on that scale even in the U.S. I know, I have done it, but I hope to never do that again.

American workers' share in the enjoyment and production of American wealth has had a complicated history. Indentured servants and African slaves obviously produced much but consumed little. The vastness of virgin lands "liberated" from Indian tribes meant family farms could do pretty well until about 1870. Then we had the period of robber capitalism until the Great Depression. A lot of people think the Democrats and New Deal paved the way for the Great Prosperity of 1940 to 1970, but a lot of variables were involved.

Americans forget, or do not know, that two of the world's most historically evil people, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Joseph Stalin of the U.S.S.R. (Russia), nevertheless deserve a lot of credit for ending the Great Depression. Because the U.S.S.R. was communist, its economy continued to grow through the 1930s. Germany had a very bad economic meltdown, which is one reason Hitler came to power, and he basically ordered everyone back to work, so Germany recovered from the Depression years ahead of the United States.

Then World War II came along. Germany destroyed Russia's factories. Their bombers tore up Great Britain pretty well too. German and American bombers destroyed Germany's factories. China was pretty well destroyed, and Japan's factories were bombed, in some cases vaporized, by the U.S.

Come 1946, almost all of the factory capacity of the world was in the United States, and a great deal of what was abroad was owned by American capitalists. Making wage concessions to union, or even non-union, workers in the U.S. was no big deal. Buy peace at home, extract wealth from abroad.

I believe that workers should share the wealth that they produce and that democratic government should be used to control the excesses of capitalism. In fact, I would prefer an anarcho-syndicalist social system, in which people work cooperatively and don't need much in the way of governance.

Localism posits that a healthy economy and society can be built up apart from the global economy and society. Certainly historically some areas have prospered and some areas have failed and most have been somewhere in the middle. So it is a gamble. Make yourself an island and maybe you can pay your workers $20 an hour for work that has a global scale of $4 per hour. On the other hand, you might be setting up a downward spiral towards being one of those places where people would be happy to get $1 an hour and not starve, rather than not working at all.

In 1700, China and India were the wealthiest nations in the world. Their highly paid artisans were reduced to poverty in the next two centuries as manufactured goods from Great Britain replaced local crafts. Today Chindia is rapidly become the world's most important economic region. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, that growth is not particularly fueled by exports. It is mainly fueled by infrastructure development and a growth in internal consumption.

Unionism in the U.S. failed for a variety of reasons, but the main one was that unions never took power from capitalists. Instead, using the profits from imperialism, the U.S. capitalist class bought off sectors of the U.S. workers with middle-class levels of pay. And in the case of AFL-CIO bureaucrats, upper-management levels of pay.

The times they are a changin. Worker pay relative to management and capitalist pay has been declining in the U.S., which should upgrade revolutionary potential. But culture usually lags, rather than leads, economics. Worker culture in the U.S. is mostly looking to a return of the glory days of 1940 to 1970, when you could get a good paycheck without becoming a radical or even joining a union. Unless the U.S. blows up everyone else's factories again, those days are not going to return. The workers' movement has to be based upon the new economic realities. A key question is: can it be a national struggle, a local struggle, or must it be an international struggle?

Kandahar, Okinawa, and Imperial Implosions

For weeks U.S. gunmen have been announcing they are getting ready to "take" the city of Kandahar in Afghanistan. U.S. gunmen have a long history of taking things, from the lands around Plymouth, Massachusetts and Jamestown, Virginia in the 1600s to the nation of Iraq. It would be unwise to bet against them, unless the odds were good. On the other hand the Afghani tribes have expelled everyone who has tried to grab their land in the past few centuries. It would be unwise to bet against them, too. The Soviet Union (USSR) could not hold Kandahar, and collapsed about three years after withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in Japan everyone found out this weekend that they are still subjects of the United States. President of the United States Barack Obama ordered Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to allow Okinawa to continue to be used as a U.S. military base, and despite a great deal of national indignation, Hatoyama announced yesterday that he was following orders. What can he do? After U.S. gunmen grabbed Japan during World War II, they wrote Japan a constitution that prohibits it from being able to arm itself for defense against the United States. Invading Japan would be easier that invading North Korea or Iraq.

Supposedly in return Japan can hide behind the U.S. military umbrella. That would be the world's most expensive umbrella, and I am not the only one wondering how long the U.S. taxpayer will be willing to pay for it. One of the main aspects of the umbrella was encircling China, a nation U.S. gunmen thought they had grabbed fair and square during World War II. Only Mao & comrades did not play fair, they took their nation from American puppet Chiang Kai-shek. American taxpayers have been paying for the defense of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines every since.

Which is remarkably stupid, but at the end of World War II the United States was the only nation in the world that had factories that were in running order (everyone else's had been bombed), so for decades we could do stupid things without paying much of a penalty.

China could be a military threat to its neighbors, but it isn't really because that is one very tough neighborhood the Chinese live in. They've got the Russians to the north and west and India to the Southwest, both very capable nations. The Vietnamese are capable of repulsing anyone, as they showed during the 1960s. Taiwan has not been tested in war but is technologically very capable. Japan could be a great military power if only it would break with the U.S. That leaves the Philippines, which U.S. gunmen grabbed at the end of the 19th century. The Philippines China could grab; any major power could grab the Philippines, but only if no other power intervened.

The U.S. could still be leading the world economically because we live in a nice neighborhood. With only Canada and Mexico for neighbors, we should need almost no military spending at all.

My best guess is the U.S. will be defeated in Afghanistan. That is the easy part. The question is, will this cause the U.S. empire to collapse like the Soviet Union did? Like the British Empire did after World War II? And if yes, how quickly?

Be certain that intelligence officers in most nations, but in particular in China, France, Russia, Great Britain, and India are asking themselves this question and outlining scenarios for it. All of them are planning to stab the U.S. in the back as soon as we are weak enough to make it safe, and who's to blame them?

Americans are out of work, which is lost productivity. Defense spending is at a peak, which is wasted productivity. The national debt is a staggering load to carry, which will sap future productivity. The national deficit seems necessary to prevent renewed recession, but is rapidly inflating the national debt. There is no real plan to make American's productive again. There is just hope in free enterprise voodoo mixed with government-subsidized voodoo.

So what I think we should consider is: hard landing, or soft landing? In a hard landing the U.S. economy tanks and military spending has to be cut because people, domestic and foreign, will refuse to lend more money to the United States Treasury. In other words, a sovereign debt crisis like Greece is experiencing will result in a power struggle between the capitalists who are connected to the military and the capitalists who see their own businesses being destroyed by the military budget.

In a soft landing some politicians start severely trimming U.S. military commitments before they lead to economic suicide. I don't know who those politicians would be. That kind of politician is usually filtered out of the American political process long before they get to the U.S. House of Representatives.

So I'm figuring on a hard landing. But I don't think it is going to happen until the next economic down cycle, which may not be until 2015. We should have a relatively long up cycle because we dipped so low in 2009.

See also: Okinawa, Commodore Perry, and the Lew Chew Raid [March 8, 2010]

Commodore Perry, Japan, and Hypocrisy

Reading in detail about Commodore Perry's mission to Japan in 1853 and 1854, I could not help but be struck by the astonishing level of hypocrisy in the account. Perhaps this is because Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan was written by a minister, Francis L. Hawks, but more likely it simply and accurately reflects ruling class Amerian attitudes of that day.

The United States already had an extensive trade with China, and its whaling ships regularly operated in the seas around Japan. The U.S. had first been extended to the Pacific Ocean in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. You'll recall that Napoleon Bonaparte claimed France owned extensive lands that were in fact the sovereign tribal lands of native American Indians. He sold this dubious title to the United States, led by slaver President Thomas Jefferson, for $15,000,000. The Oregon area was disputed by Spain, Russia, and Great Britain, but by1818 the U.S. had the upper hand and in 1846 the current border was settled by treaty, again without input from the Indians.

The war of aggression against Mexico starting in 1846 was largely designed by U.S. expansionists to get California and the port of San Francisco. American colonists moved rapidly into California, where their new government raised taxes on land just long enough to force most Mexican landholders to sell their holding.

Racism against the Asiatic peoples known as American Indians of course carried over to Euro-American attitudes towards Asians in China and Japan. But another matter that looms behind the Perry expedition is slavery. In the 1850s the U.S. nation practiced slavery, although slavery had been banned in the British Empire.

So if you believe the constant protestations by Perry and his gang that his expedition was about extending the "friendship" of the United States to the nation of Japan, you are naive.

The Japanese were not naive. They had already had considerable experience with the Christian and European meanings of friendship. They had closed off Japan to almost all intercourse with Europeans since the 1600s, in self-defense. Even their traditional trading partner, China, was allowed to trade only at the port of Nagasaki. The one European power the Japanese traded with was the Netherlands. But the Japanese government used the Dutch (also confined to Nagasaki) not so much for physical trade as to keep up on world events. When Perry came knocking at their door they knew about the United States, and they knew about the history of Europeans colonizing Asia. They also knew about many of the inventions of the West, like steam engines, although they had prohibited their actual importation. They had translators that read or spoke Dutch, Chinese, English, and probably other foreign languages. They knew the U.S. had successfully rebelled against Great Britain, and that Franklin Pierce was its President.

And they knew about the First Opium War. The government of China had made opium illegal for the obvious reasons. British (and also some American traders) had insisted on their right to profit from selling opium into China, and the British government defeated the Chinese in 1842, just ten years before the Perry expedition. In the aftermath of the Opium War the U.S. signed a rather one-sided treaty with China, one of the Unequal Treaties, the Treaty of Wanxia of 1844.

While protesting friendship on his mission to Japan (commanding a battle fleet capable of flattening Tokyo), Perry presents the U.S. treaty with China as a model of the sort of treaty the U.S. wants with China.

Even the summaries of the treaty sparring in the book can be tedious, but both sides knew what was really going on. The Japanese certainly knew about the imposition of the Unequal Treaties on China after the Opium War, and certainly had a copy of the treaty. Matthew Perry pretended the Japanese did not know, but he knew they knew. He kept threatening to send for more ships (with more cannon, and soldiers) if the Japanese would not make a treaty. The Japanese said they understood the need of the U.S. to take on coal (the petroleum of that era), water and food, and wanted to allow it at Nagasaki. Perry, representing American merchants and industrialists, wanted free trade, the right to trade anything anywhere. Politely, no one mentioned opium.

The Japanese were not in a position to defend themselves and their way of life, and knew it. They signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with the U.S., and soon signed similar treaties with the European powers. Within a decade the rulers of Japan had decided that to defend themselves they needed to rapidly modernize, at whatever cost to their traditional ways.

In the 1850's Japan looked to some Americans like the next California, a place that could be grabbed, where the native peoples could be put on reservations and left to die.

By 1900 the Japanese were ready to withstand an attack from the imperialist powers. They expanded their vision. They would eventually free all of Asia from colonial slavery to Germany, France, Russia, Britain, the U.S. and the Netherlands.

And that really angered the U.S. ruling class and its global allies.

General MacArthur, the Philippines, and Japan

I just finished posting my notes on Ameican Caesar, a biography of Douglas MacArthur by William Manchester. This is part of my Asian War book project. So the notes are not particularly for military buffs, or MacArthur history junkies. They reflect my interest in the historic relations (mainly war) between the United States and the nations of Asia.

General MacArthur's story is most relevant to the history of the Philippines. His father, Arthur MacArthur, Jr., would now be classified as a war criminal by any fair-minded person. The U.S. invaded a nation, which is a war crime, and Douglas MacArthur killed both Filipono independence fighters, and civilians, for daring to not go along with the conquest. The Filipino upper class, themselves exploiters of their lower classes, were happy to collaborate with American occupiers just as they had collaborated with Spain. When Douglas MacArthur in turn became military commander of the Philippines he had good relations with these upper-class Filipinos. Guerrilla insurgents were a minor problem for America by the 1930s.

Before World War II every Asian nation had an independence movement. All these movements felt betrayed by the League of Nations, which was dominated by the British Empire and which, in practice, supported "national self-determination" only in white-majority nations. U.S. presidents often used independence rhetoric, but always supported colonial powers like Britain, France, and the Netherlands in practice. Of the Asian nations only Japan was truly independent. China was a particular trouble spot. It had numerous governments, including one run under Japanese protection and the government (if you can call it that) of Chiang Kai-shek, who was essentially an American puppet, but whose government really was just a collection of war lords.

MacArthur's job was to defend the Philippines against Japan. Because the U.S. had about ten times the industrial capacity of Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt knew that Japanese civilian leaders did not want war with the U.S. By insulting and bullying Japan, however, Roosevelt was able to bring the Japanese military leaders to greater influence. If Japan had not gone to war, the U.S. would have been in a position to take over Japan and China at a minimal cost.

Men like Roosevelt and MacArthur were, however, overconfident of easy victory. They were shocked by the successful military strategy and tactics of Japan in the opening days of the war. The Japanese quickly liberated Vietnam from the French, the Philippines from America, the British from Singapore and Burma, and the Dutch from the East Indies (later Indonesia). The problem for the Japanese was that they probably needed another decade of eocnomic development to make this new "Co-prosperity" sphere into something that could stand up to the imperialist powers in a war. In America, even before Pearl Harbor, planes, tanks, and war ships were rolling off assembly lines in numbers the Japanese could not match. Only the need to train new recruits and to send most military material to help the British Empire fight the new German Empire prevented the U.S. from quickly kicking the Japanese out of their new possessions.

Within two years of Pearl Harbor, U.S. submarines had sunk almost all Japanese merchant shipping. The Japanese military, for all its faults, did not think any honor accrued to commanders that killed civilians or sank civilian shipping. So they failed to create an effective submarine fleet. With almost no internal deposits of iron, oil, or coal, and no ships to bring those materials in, the Japanese could produce planes and battle ships only from reserves already on their islands. At first the Japanese sank more U.S. Navy vessels than vice versa, but those were hollow victories. When a Japanese vessel sank, it could not be replaced. Every American vessel that sank was quickly replace by three or four more.

In the end, we had Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strangely, General MacArthur, usually thought of as a right-wing zealot, wrote a very liberal constitution for Japan and even did a land redistribution program that was right out of the communist handbook. His motives, however, were not liberal. He wanted to weaken Japan's military capability and military culture.

Meanwhile, America's military culture was greatly stengthened by our victory in World War II. We quickly betrayed the peoples we made promises to during the war. No one got immediate independence except Burma. But in the Japanese wake the independence movements were much stronger. The U.S. granted the Philippines independence. Then the Netherlands decided the cost of war was too high, after trying it, and granted independence to Indonesia. Mao and the communists created an independent China. Vietnam, however, was returned to colonial status under the French.

Another interesting note for me was having to add another senior policy advisor to those who opposed using atomic weapons on civilian cities in Japan. I already knew that Eisenhower opposed using the atomic bomb. According the Manchester, MacArthur also opposed using these weapons of mass destruction. So, for all of you who want to get out your partisan scorecards, all Democratic Party senior officials involved favored committing these war crimes. The two Republicans who were consulted, Eisenhower and MacArthur, were against committing these particular war crimes.

The Episcopal Church and the Evil Empires

In the news recently we had a case of Pope Benedict poaching Anglican priests. This is news only in the sense that it is the latest incident in the long history of the battle between the Roman Catholic Church and those it considers heretics. It falls into the pattern of the Roman Church trying to take religion back to the Middle Ages, before the Protestant Reformation. But not back before 600 A.D., before the Bishop of Rome's claims of authority over all Christians began to take hold in Western Europe.

My focus has always been on the Catholic Church, with other Christian sects being secondary. The Protestants are less scary because they a fragmented. They typically have not been able to oppress people on a larger-than-national basis.

The Anglican Church (churches affiliated with the Church of England), known in the United States of America as the Episcopal Church, is an exception. In this essay I'll look at the big historic picture of this Church. I'll leave the controversies about homosexual and female ministers, as well as theological differences with other sects, until later.

The most important big picture item is something called the British Empire. It does not amount to much today, but starting around 1600 the British (England, Scotland and Wales) started expanding rapidly. They grabbed sugar islands in the Caribbean and cut into the Dutch spice trade with Asia as best they could. Eventually the empire included much of North America, Africa, and Asia, as well as Australia. It was the largest empire the world has seen, and by any reasonable standard (killing, raping, stealing, and oppressing) it was at least as evil as any empire in history.

The official theology of this evil empire was that of the Anglican Church. Of course men had other motivations, mainly greed and lust for power. Anglo-American apologists claim that religion was a mitigating factor. If the British had all been atheists, we are led to believe, the sins of the Empire would have been worse. But that is a phony analysis. If the Jesus doctrine of love sometimes caused an act of mercy, I don't want to discount that. But it is more important to understand how Anglican beliefs and culture contributed to the violence required to build the British Empire.

When the Anglican Church separated from the Roman Church around 1538, for the most part the basic theology of the Church remained intact. In addition to recognizing that the Pope was not the ordained leader of the early Christians, many of the practices added by Rome during the Middle Ages were stripped out of the mix.

Did the Anglican Church contribute to the brutal British Empire because it continued to hold so much in common with the Roman branch of the Christian Church? Both religions spawned brutal empires, so the answer, on the whole, has to be yes. The other fundamental question, would the British have established their global empire had they not been Anglican, is harder to answer. Marxists would tend to say yes. Like the Dutch, who the English lagged behind and then overtook, the British Empire developed alongside modern industrial capitalism. Marxists would typically argue that as the religion of the capitalist ruling class of Britain, the religion (a social superstructure, in Marxist terms), or the imperialist interpretation of it, simply comes to reflect the needs of capital. I think that is too simple.

Nationalism certainly played a role in the formation of the Anglican church. The combined forces of 16th and 17th century (merchant piracy abroad and industrial development within Britain) were reinforced by the idea that Jesus and his (in this case Anglican) Church were destined to spiritual conquer of the world. The missionary went arm in arm with the conquering armies, the slave traders, and the rapacious merchants. In the 1800's it seemed as if Anglican, and American Episcopal, churches would become the dominant Christian, and then global, religion.

The very idea that there is a God and a group of specialists (bishops and ministers) that know His will provides a cultural prop for Empire. Resisting native populations can be classified as uncivilized and heathen. Basic rights, like the right to their private property and to self-determination, can be denied in good faith. Attitudes of religious superiority tie in well with racism and cultural imperialism.

The crimes of the British against their colonial subjects are too numerous to detail in such a short essay. But it should be noted that the American empire (which began by killing native American Indians, eventually extended to the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and in its commercial and government-by-puppets current form rules the world) was largely a creation of men who belonged to the Episcopal Church. The elite of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant segment of the population of the United States were highly concentrated in the Episcopal Church. George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Chester Arthur, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush were all Episcopalians. [See also religions of U.S. Presidents]

The Episcopal Church is no longer the affiliation of choice for aspiring American politicians. The votes are just not there any more - Episcopalians number only about 2 million. However, on a global scale the Anglican church cannot be discounted, as it is still the largest of the Protestant churches, with about 75 million members.

I hope to develop this subject further over time. Anglican v. Roman Christianity is a classic compare and contrast subject that can illuminate the role of religion in global affairs. The question of how religion props up empires, or encourages oppression within a nation, has not yet been answered to my satisfaction.

See also: Anglican Communion at Wikipedia