Sunday June 1, 2008, 7:55 am
Noted. Thanks Robert.

Sunday June 1, 2008, 8:42 am

Thanks, Robert! Very informative article.

Sunday June 1, 2008, 10:04 am
"The impoverished majority will continue to be terrorised, starved and deprived by hypocritical, sadistic Western Bloc politicians, the corporate elites they front for and their regional proxies and puppets."

TY, Robert.

Sunday June 1, 2008, 11:47 am
Maureen Dowd says, They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.

So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.

Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.

How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?

It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink,” about the value of trusting your gut.

Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.

It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.

We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.

In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.

The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.

It was not the fake casus belli that made Colin Powell’s blood boil. What really got Powell disgusted was that W. and Dick Cheney used him, tapping into his credibility to sell their trumped-up war; that George Tenet failed to help him scrub his U.N. speech of all Cheney’s garbage; and that W. showed him the door so the more malleable Condi could have his job.

Tenet was privately worried about a war buildup not backed up by C.I.A. facts, but he only publicly sounded the alarm years later in a lucrative memoir fueled by payback, after Condi and Cheney tried to cast him as the fall guy on W.M.D.

McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.

“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”

And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.

“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”

He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.

“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.

W.’s dwindling cadre hit back hard. In Stockholm, Condi — labeled “sometimes too accommodating” by the author — scoffed: “The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war.”

She’s right. He was very clear about it being because of W.M.D. Then he was very clear about it being to rid the world of a tyrant. Then he was very clear about it being to spread democracy. When that didn’t work out, he was very clear about it being that we can’t leave because we can’t leave.

He was always wrong, but always very clear.

Sunday June 1, 2008, 2:48 pm
Like Mel Brooks said "It's good to be the King!"

Sunday June 1, 2008, 9:23 pm


The following is a quote from Ron Kovic (best known for "Born on the 4th of July"), from a recent news article:

"To kill another human being, to take another life out of this world with one pull of a trigger, is something that never leaves you. It is as if a part of you dies with that person. If you choose to keep on living, there may be a healing, and even hope and happiness again, but that scar and memory and sorrow will be with you forever. Why did the recruiters never mention these things? This was never in the slick pamphlets they gave us."

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/86654/?page=1

Sunday June 1, 2008, 11:53 pm
very interesting Robert...thankyou

Monday June 2, 2008, 5:49 am
Western Bloc central banks and financial and investment corporations are locked into an inflationary dynamic in order to sustain their system’s militarist imperialism. The Bloc’s European and Pacific components offer supportive economic collaboration. In exchange, the US serves as the Bloc’s global enforcer.

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve and corporate financial houses work together boosting dollar zone money supply, devaluing the dollar. Their partners take compensatory steps, intervening in G7 financial markets. They seek to keep their currencies in some kind of sustainable relationship for purposes of mutual trade and finance equilibrium so as to support US budget and current account deficits.

As the value of the dollar declines the oil price has to rise so producers can maintain operating and marketing margins. A comparison of the US-Euro price trend with the oil price trend through 2006 and 2008 shows a surprisingly uniform correlation between the two. Against the Euro the US$ fell from around 1.21 in January 2006 to around 1.45 in January 2008. The oil price fell on a similar trend from around US$60 to just under US$100. On average, for around every cent the dollar lost against the euro, the oil price rose a little under US$2.

If one looks at the oil price and US$-Euro figures through 2007 up to April 2008, one can see that the trend is even more uniform and continues more sharply. The US$ fell against the Euro from around 1.35 in April 2007 to around 1.57 a year later. During the same period the oil price rose from around US$63 to around US$132. Roughly, an average increase of US$3 for every one cent drop in the value of the dollar.

The US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury will carry on increasing the money supply, devaluing the dollar. They do so to fund US government military spending, other components of the US budget deficit and to prevent insolvent banks and financial corporations from going under. The European Central Bank will continue to set its money supply and accompanying policies to sustain recent trends in the Euro’s relationship to the US dollar and bolster its own shaky corporate financial markets.




Click to see a larger image.

If there really is a straightforward correlation between the US$-Euro price and the oil price, then December 2008 will see the dollar at around US$1.70 to US$1.75 against the Euro and the oil price at around US$170 to US$180. A strike against Iran or a successful provocation against Venezuela would certainly intensify that 30 month trend. There seems no obvious reason for any significant short-term reversal.

If speculation is a significant component of the oil price why is the US$-Euro price trend so uniformly similar to the oil price trend? The rising oil price tracks the dollar’s decline - not vice versa. Even if speculation is a factor, the price will most likely remain well over US$140-US$150 because the US budget and current account deficits are not going to change much in the short term and may well get worse. As inflation gathers pace over the medium term, interest rates will rise more or less sharply to counter the threat of hyper-inflation.

That may signal the end of the current apparent correlation between the oil price and the decline of the US dollar against the Euro. Whatever way such a medium-term reversal - perhaps by mid-2009 - pans out, one can be absolutely certain the Western Bloc ancien regime will sustain its militarism in support of corporate globalization. Both the US and the European financial systems seem hostage now to inflationary processes in response to the collapse of their long stretched out credit and asset booms.

The European Central Bank prattles on about fighting inflation the same way the US Treasury waffles on about a strong dollar. In fact, it looks as though the Western Bloc finance system is locked into an incestuous fatal inflationary embrace. The US authorities are incapable of dealing with the country’s deficits by ending its wars and the grotesque military spending levels they promote. US allies string along, unwilling or unable to force a correction.

Since the US plutocrat elite cannot give up their wars, the likelihood is they will savage domestic social security and associated programmes to try and cap the budget deficit. Certainly, the corporate plutocrats will not pay. Whoever wins the US Presidency in November, the wars, the militarism, the in-your-face corporate welfare will continue. If they cannot continue boosting the money supply as before to sustain credit and asset bubbles, they will attack the poor and disadvantaged and shrink the middle classes winning compliance by means of the “war on terror” motif.

They will do that domestically and internationally. In Europe, people will be told they cannot have their accustomed pensions and social benefits any more. But funding will continue for NATO commitments, for troops and materiel in Afghanistan, for the UN Israeli-protection forces in Lebanon, for interventions under various pretexts In Africa. Money will be found to support any US intervention against Iran and Syria, against Hizbollah, perhaps against Venezuela.

It may be possible for individuals like Bernanke and Paulson and their mates in the US, Europe and Japan to avoid lurching at the controls of their dollar-euro-yen-vomiting moneyness engines into some dank deflationary slough of despond. It may also be possible they end up knocking back unprecedently enormous swigs of neoliberal hemlock. The impoverished majority will continue to be terrorised, starved and deprived by hypocritical, sadistic Western Bloc politicians, the corporate elites they front for and their regional proxies and puppets.




Their corporate media will continue telling us how well intentioned all those politicians are. But it seems clear from the suspiciously uniform correlation between the US-Euro price and the oil price, those politicians are deliberately fomenting the inflation that is destroying the economies of vulnerable countries around the world. Why are they doing that if not to maintain their ancien regime power and privilege by means of military backed corporate globalization?

They and their corporate media tell us we live in the best of all possible worlds because no other world order is possible. All this suffering and moral debris and economic chaos we’re sorting through… where could it all have come from? The anarchy of the “free market”?

Ever since Bretton Woods, G7 governments have worked together ever more closely planning economic strategy. They rig outcomes so as to protect and promote the interests of their corporate elites. Their corporate propaganda media call this the “free market”. They are talking only to themselves.

Monday June 2, 2008, 9:36 am
An interesting read about the economics of war and gas prices.

TY, Robert.

Thursday June 5, 2008, 7:07 am

I agree with Jim P..interesting economics and thanks for copying as my window never opened to the article.

On the subject of S. McClellan...'HOGWASH'..The guy is writing to get rich, telling in a book what should have been ACTED ON in office at least 4 years ago. He is obfuscating from the reality of the damages and THE COURSE THAT OUR NEXT ADMINISTRATION WILL BE FORCED TO FOLLOW, as was the administration before Bush..

This actually has little to do with Bush at all.

McClellan fails to explain HOW BUSH was fraudulently elected to accelerate the Global Agenda at all fools cost, Who designed his placement for stupidity appearances, and possibly to illustrate the power of a 2 class society. It is about loosing the sovereignty in America.

McClellan playing the 'turn-coat' game wants the general population to think the past 8 years were about Bush & Comp. and nothing to do with a continuing global agenda or planned destruction of liberty.

EVERYONE KNOWS BUSH IS A LIAR...

A summary by Jack Dresser, Ph.D., with selected excerpts from two books:

Bush on the Couch by Justin A. Frank, M.D.
Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, George Washington University
and
The Superpower Syndrome by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Harvard University


Psychiatrist Jerrold Post, M.D., founder of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, stated, “the leader who cannot adapt to external realities because he adheres to an internally programmed life script...has displaced his private needs upon the state.” Applied psychoanalysis is a discipline used routinely by intelligence agencies since early in World War II to identify such distortions and predict political behavior through psychological profiles of foreign leaders. Although lacking the data of direct doctor-patient interaction, such analyses have far greater external data available to draw upon. Dr. Frank has applied these methods to George W. Bush. Dr. Lifton focuses on the theme of grandiosity and unresolved personal self-doubt projected into our foreign policy.

A Sense of Entitlement

A lifelong “sense of entitlement” has been exhibited by Mr. Bush, described by Washington psychoanalyst Justin Frank. Dr. Frank has published a comprehensive study of Mr. Bush’s personality, based upon his many public statements, public actions, and the historical record provided by biographers, journalists, and others who have known him well and observed him closely over many years. Specifically, Mr. Bush feels and acts entitled to disregard the laws, rules and expectations governing ordinary people.

This has taken many forms over many years. He did not have to “pay attention” at Yale, to wait his turn in line to gain safety from war in the Texas Air National Guard, to observe the law regarding intoxicated driving, to file required reports on his Harken Energy stock sales with the SEC, or to respect the will of Florida voters. His has become our national outlaw ethic. He disrespects U.S.-signed treaties to reduce global warming and nuclear proliferation, and refuses to support the International Criminal Court. This fits the romanticized American outlaw image, but is an adolescent response to problems needing complex adult solutions.

Violating a principle common to all human societies, Bush entitles himself to lie without guilt. He has misled, misrepresented, and lied outright and continuously throughout his public life. This has been witnessed and described by many observers. There are volumes of documentation by writers of impeccable reliability recounting the Bush practice of saying anything to control the perceptions of others and get what he wants.

Bush’s Orwellian descriptions that totally misrepresent known facts reveal his perceived exemption even from the laws of reality, suggesting disordered thinking. He also claims exemption from the laws of personal and public accountability. “I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation,” he told journalist Bob Woodward.
truncate

Thursday June 5, 2008, 7:33 am

Bush was the PERFECT IDIOT to accomplish what Mr. Big wanted and expected him to accomplish.

Remember, 'Mission Accomplished'?
We know Bush was the perfect plant for the needed mega strides made in global imperialism.
McClellan's it writing a further dumbing down for the misinformed.

I suppose it is good he wrote it but it is only a partial apology of the obvious intended to squelch rumors of a take over by the industrial complex.

This is how I see it and it pains me.