Is the US a parasite on the world economy?

[mhgaffney]

Evidently the staid Swiss think so. So does Putin. So does the EU. Read on...

MHG

A Parasite On The World

By Paul Craig Roberts

August 12, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --If Russian prime minister Putin’s recent description of America as “a parasite on the world” was reported by the US media, little doubt but that most Americans were infuriated. We are the virtuous people. Without us good guys to police the world there would be mayhem and wars everywhere, not merely the ones we started in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Without the American white hats people everywhere would be starving and dying from natural disasters. It is us chosen ones who provide the rescue operations and good deeds. How dare the former KGB monster to slander our country!

Is it merely a coincidence that on August 11 the Swiss announced that they were discarding their monetary constitution that has prevented inflation in Switzerland and that has made their currency a safe haven for people everywhere who desired to protect their wealth, both small and large, from the predatory inflation practices of their own governments? Or is the Swiss announcement a result of America’s financial irresponsibility, the behavior of a parasite?

The Swiss said that they are forced to violate their monetary constitution, because the irresponsible practices of the United States and European Union monetary authorities are driving so many dollars and euros into Swiss francs that the franc has appreciated to astronomical heights and is threatening Switzerland with the collapse of their export markets and Gross Domestic Product.

The EU says it has no choice but to bail out its private banks as that is the policy of Washington, DC, and that it must print euros in order to bail out the banks. This policy is in violation of the charter of the European Central Bank, but what do rules and laws mean in today’s world? Nothing whatsoever.

Obviously, Washington is threatening the world not merely with war but also with inflation.

After announcing a massive printing of Swiss francs to absorb the inflow of dollars and euros so that the exchange value of the franc would not rise further, the Swiss government announced that it would peg its franc to the euro. That means that the Swiss will defend the pegged rate of exchange by printing enough francs to offset the inflows of euros. I think that the Swiss chose the euro as the peg over the US dollar because the majority of Swiss exports are to Europe rather than to the US.

Years ago China pegged its yuan to the US dollar, not to protect its currency from rising as a result of flight from the dollar, but in order to demonstrate that the money of what was seen as a questionable communist currency was “as good as the US dollar.”

Not long ago China was forced off the fixed peg by the amount of Chinese money creation necessary to maintain the peg. China substituted a “moving peg” that allows the Chinese currency to slowly appreciate against the dollar. The Chinese currency is rising as the dollar falls, but the “floating peg” is behind events. Consequently, China’s currency is under-valued with regard to the “superpower” dollar, and China is importing inflation by having to create yuan in order to maintain the floating peg as the dollar is declining faster than the peg.

Oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have their currencies in a fixed peg to the dollar. If the dollar depreciates too much in currency markets, the price of oil tends to go up. In other words, oil producers can compensate for US dollar devaluation by hiking the oil price of their main export.

So, we can begin to see what Putin means. If the Americans are irresponsible with their monetary policy, if American banks have loans and credit default swaps to threatened European banks that require bailouts from the European Central Bank in order to protect the US banks as well as the solvency of the European private banks, if the price of oil, which is priced in dollars, goes up to the rest of the world because of US monetary irresponsibility, the entire world suffers from the Americans’ inability or unwillingness to put their house in order.

If anything, Putin understated the burden that America is on the world.

How much longer will the world put up with “the virtuous nation?”

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and associate editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

[mhgaffney]

Peace activist Kathy Kelly describes the incredible hospitality she experienced in Pakistan

even as the US war machine was wreaking mayhem.

She argues that our nation has lost its way -- and she is right.
MHG

More Lost By the Second

By Kathy Kelly

August 11, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- It’s a bit odd to me that with my sense of geographical direction I’m ever regarded as a leader to guide groups in foreign travel. I’m recalling a steaming hot night in Lahore, Pakistan when Josh Brollier and I, having enjoyed a lengthy dinner with Lahore University students, needed to head back to the guest lodgings graciously provided us by a headmaster of the Garrison School for Boys. We had boarded a rickshaw, but the driver had soon become terribly lost and with my spotty sense of direction and my complete ignorance of Urdu, I couldn’t be any help. My cell phone was out of juice, and I was uncertain anyway of the needed phone number. I bumped and jostled in the back seat of the rickshaw, next to Josh, as we embarked on a nightmare of travel over unpaved, rutted roads in dizzying traffic until finally the rickshaw driver spotted a sign belonging to our school – the wrong campus, we all knew – and eager to unload us, roused the inhabitants and hustled us and our bags into the street before moving on.

We stood inside the gate, staring blankly at a family that had been sound asleep on cots in the courtyard. In no time, the father of the family scooped up his two children, gently moving them to the cot he shared with his wife so that Josh and I would have a cot on which to sit. Then he and his spouse disappeared into their humble living quarters. He reappeared with a fan and an extension cord, wanting to give us some relief from the blistering night heat. His wife emerged carrying a glass of tea for each of us. They didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat, but they were treating us as family – the celebrated but always astonishing hospitality that we’d encountered in the region so many times before. Eventually, we established with our host that we were indeed at the wrong campus, upon which he called the family that had been nervously waiting for our errant selves.

This courtyard scene of startling hospitality would return to my mind when we all learned of the U.S. Joint Special Operations (JSO) Force night raid in the Nangarhar province, on May 12, 2011. No matter which side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border you are on, suffocating hot temperatures prevail day and night during these hot months. It’s normal for people to sleep in their courtyards. How could anyone living in the region not know this? Yet the U.S. JSO forces that came in the middle of the night to the home of a 12-year-old girl, Nilofer, who had been asleep on her cot in the courtyard, began their raid by throwing a grenade into the courtyard, landing at Nilofer’s head. She died instantly. Nilofer’s uncle raced into the courtyard. He worked with the Afghan Local Police, and they had told him not to join that night’s patrol because he didn’t know much about the village they would go to, so he had instead gone to his brother’s home. When he heard the grenade explode, he may well have presumed the Taliban were attacking the home. U.S. troops killed him as soon as they saw him. Later, NATO issued an apology.

“The raids occur ‘every night. We are very much miserable,’ said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament.” I am reading a McClatchy news report, dated August 8th of this year. “Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban.”

Imagine it. People in an Afghan village pass sleepless nights, anxious that their home might be targeted by a U.S.-led night raid. Villagers are enraged when they hear stories of elders and imams being roughed up and detained, of wives and children being killed, of belongings stolen and property destroyed. Increasingly, the U.S. military battles against the so-called insurgency are creating a stronger resistance as more Afghans grow determined to fight back.

In Helmand province, in Nad Ali, the district governor told a New York Times reporter one incident in the spiral of violence: a NATO foot patrol came under fire from a family home on August 5, 2011, killing one soldier and wounding an Afghan interpreter. The NATO troops called in an airstrike. NATO is now investigating a report that the airstrike killed eight civilians, seven of them children. “The home belonged to Mullah Abdul Hadi, 50, a local imam who Afghan officials say was helping the Taliban,” said Mr. Shamlani. “He was killed along with one of his two wives and his seven children, all younger than 7 years old.”

People in Nad Ali are expected to embrace closer relations with the United States and its troops after the deaths at our hands of seven children, children they knew aged one to seven, who had committed no crime.

Now comes the U.S. determination to seal a “Strategic Partnership Declaration” with its client Afghan government. Many in that country (and this one) expect such an agreement to allow the U.S. to establish permanent military bases, a permanent occupation presence that will provoke resistance groups there to declare perpetual war.

The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a group of young people dedicated to ending wars and inequalities in their country, write in their August 9th statement:

The US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Declaration will perpetuate ‘terrorism’ and bring it to everyone’s doorsteps.

The ‘partnership’ will allow permanent joint US-Afghanistan military bases to launch and project hard power. The ‘extreme’ Taliban will conveniently ‘use’ these bases as a stand-alone reason for their ‘holy jihad.’ We cannot forget that one of Osama Bin Laden’s reasons for attacking the US on September 11th was the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia.

This Strategic Partnership Declaration will kill any chance for our madness to slow down and our violence to calm down.

It will doom ordinary Americans and Afghans to permanent terrorism.

Why can’t we quiet our nerves, look deep inside humanity, and begin healing?

Everyone wants to be safe, but I think of the Lahore family taking us into their sleeping courtyard and their home that night, knowing nothing of these crazy Americans who had been dropped on their doorstep. We had woken them up but they chose to stay awake and take care of us. Americans seem to respond to our endless wake-up calls from Afghanistan by just going, every time, back to sleep, rather than working to make the situation better. I think of the night raids, families being woken up to sudden horror somewhere every night in the region, children killed sleeping in our efforts to make ourselves more safe (among other motives), and an ever escalating conflict arising from the violence.

We are startlingly, terrifyingly lost, and we’re getting ever more so. If we see a sign here in the darkness, an opportunity to make contact with the people around us, we should take it gratefully. The letter from my Afghan Youth friends is another sign for me that we do not belong in the Afghan home forever, occupying it at gunpoint. However groggily we may have awoken or reawoken to this dreadful situation and our role in it, we must act now to free our Afghan hosts of their overstaying guests, and get the U.S. safely back to where it should be.

Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. A Voices delegation is presently visiting, in Kabul, with The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Both groups are helping organize for the October 6, 2011 “Stop the Machine! Create a New World!” campaign to end wars. Kathy can be reached at: kathy@vcnv.org :

[StugotsIII]

Cool story bro.

[Tombstone RJ]

Evidently the staid Swiss think so. So does Putin. So does the EU. Read on...

MHG

A Parasite On The World

By Paul Craig Roberts

August 12, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --If Russian prime minister Putin’s recent description of America as “a parasite on the world” was reported by the US media, little doubt but that most Americans were infuriated. We are the virtuous people. Without us good guys to police the world there would be mayhem and wars everywhere, not merely the ones we started in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Without the American white hats people everywhere would be starving and dying from natural disasters. It is us chosen ones who provide the rescue operations and good deeds. How dare the former KGB monster to slander our country!

Is it merely a coincidence that on August 11 the Swiss announced that they were discarding their monetary constitution that has prevented inflation in Switzerland and that has made their currency a safe haven for people everywhere who desired to protect their wealth, both small and large, from the predatory inflation practices of their own governments? Or is the Swiss announcement a result of America’s financial irresponsibility, the behavior of a parasite?

The Swiss said that they are forced to violate their monetary constitution, because the irresponsible practices of the United States and European Union monetary authorities are driving so many dollars and euros into Swiss francs that the franc has appreciated to astronomical heights and is threatening Switzerland with the collapse of their export markets and Gross Domestic Product.

The EU says it has no choice but to bail out its private banks as that is the policy of Washington, DC, and that it must print euros in order to bail out the banks. This policy is in violation of the charter of the European Central Bank, but what do rules and laws mean in today’s world? Nothing whatsoever.

Obviously, Washington is threatening the world not merely with war but also with inflation.

After announcing a massive printing of Swiss francs to absorb the inflow of dollars and euros so that the exchange value of the franc would not rise further, the Swiss government announced that it would peg its franc to the euro. That means that the Swiss will defend the pegged rate of exchange by printing enough francs to offset the inflows of euros. I think that the Swiss chose the euro as the peg over the US dollar because the majority of Swiss exports are to Europe rather than to the US.

Years ago China pegged its yuan to the US dollar, not to protect its currency from rising as a result of flight from the dollar, but in order to demonstrate that the money of what was seen as a questionable communist currency was “as good as the US dollar.”

Not long ago China was forced off the fixed peg by the amount of Chinese money creation necessary to maintain the peg. China substituted a “moving peg” that allows the Chinese currency to slowly appreciate against the dollar. The Chinese currency is rising as the dollar falls, but the “floating peg” is behind events. Consequently, China’s currency is under-valued with regard to the “superpower” dollar, and China is importing inflation by having to create yuan in order to maintain the floating peg as the dollar is declining faster than the peg.

Oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have their currencies in a fixed peg to the dollar. If the dollar depreciates too much in currency markets, the price of oil tends to go up. In other words, oil producers can compensate for US dollar devaluation by hiking the oil price of their main export.

So, we can begin to see what Putin means. If the Americans are irresponsible with their monetary policy, if American banks have loans and credit default swaps to threatened European banks that require bailouts from the European Central Bank in order to protect the US banks as well as the solvency of the European private banks, if the price of oil, which is priced in dollars, goes up to the rest of the world because of US monetary irresponsibility, the entire world suffers from the Americans’ inability or unwillingness to put their house in order.

If anything, Putin understated the burden that America is on the world.

How much longer will the world put up with “the virtuous nation?”

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and associate editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

no arguments here. this is exactly why Ron Paul is needed badly.

[Garcia Bronco]

That's because we've started going after the swiss for allowing tax evaders to operate in their country. And Putin? No more need be said.

End of thread.

[Tombstone RJ]

the devaluing of the dollar is main problem. as for the swiss, I like the fact that they are an independent holding house for people's wealth. so be it. it has always been that way and now the US is all upset about it because of tax evasion.

well guess what--US tax laws suck azz and are confusing and allow for tax evasion.

[mhgaffney]

That's because we've started going after the swiss for allowing tax evaders to operate in their country. And Putin? No more need be said.

End of thread.

You are joking right? After Citigroup a la Robert Rubin bought the Mexican drug bank Banamex -- so Citigroup could position itself and get better access to the drug money...?

Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Wachovia are also just as guilty.

Then there was the major money laundering scandal at Bank of New York -- which laundered $10 billion out of Russia --

All of which you know zip about -- because you are just another dumber than dumb American.

[Tombstone RJ]

You are joking right? After Citigroup a la Robert Rubin bought the Mexican drug bank Banamex -- so Citigroup could position itself and get better access to the drug money...?

Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Wachovia are also just as guilty.

Then there was the major money laundering scandal at Bank of New York -- which laundered $10 billion out of Russia --

All of which you know zip about -- because you are just another dumber than dumb American.

on this we agree. This is why the fed reserve bank and the US treasury are a joke. We bail out the banks, they take that money and buy other banks, they launder drug money and the District of Corruption turns the other cheek. Add in the fact that they borrow money from the feds and then loan the money back to the fed at higher interest rates makes me sick to my stomach.

they should all (at the very least) be prosecuted for defrauding the us taxpayer and laundering drug money.

[W*GS]

gaffe is the bukkake boy for the cabal of America haters...

[mhgaffney]

NATO’S Massacre at Majer, Libya
Residents Say NATO's Air Strikes Killed 85 People, Including 33 Children, 32 Women and 20 Men
by Franklin Lamb
August 13, 2011

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/08/13/natos-massacre-at-majer-libya/

TRIPOLI — Located about 20 miles east of the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna, six miles south of Zliten, and off Libya’s southern coast across the Mediterranean from Rome, Majer was a picturesque village known for the fine quality of its dates and is claimed by locals to produce the best tarbuni (date juice) in Libya.

Family members, eyewitnesses and Libyan government officials claim that NATO’s airstrikes at Majer killed 85 people, including 33 children, 32 women, and 20 men. Reporters and visitors were shown 30 of the bodies in a local morgue, including a mother and two children. Officials and residents explained that approximately 50 bodies were taken to other locations for family burial and most of the injured were rushed to hospitals at Tripoli.


Destruction in Majer, Libya, on August 8, 2011 (AFP/Getty Images)
At Majer, NATO chose to bomb three neighboring compounds and visitors examined a total of five bombed-out houses. There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but rather mattresses, clothes and books littered the area. One badly injured 15-year old young lady, Salwa Ageil Al Jaoud, had earlier written her name inside one notebook found amidst the rubble. She was later visited in hospital and attested, like the witnesses at Qana had, that there was no military presence in the homes that were bombed.

NATO used the same tactic that Israel used during the two Qana massacres. After the first three bombs dropped at around 11:00 pm (2100 GMT) on Monday, August 8, many residents of the area ran to the bombed houses to try to save their loved ones. NATO then instantly struck with more bombs, slaughtering 85 Libyans.

The badly burned and mangled bodies of two boys named Adil Moayed Gafes and Aynan Gafees were pulled from the rubble by family members deeply in shock. One anguished gentleman repeated the words, “There is no God but Allah, and a martyr is loved by Allah,” and soon others joined in.

Standing on a pile of rubble, Libyan government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, declared, “This is a crime beyond imagination. Everything about this place is civilian!”

According to Libyan officials interviewed at the Rixos Hotel here in Tripoli last night, NATO attacked Majer “to try to help rebel fighters enter the government-held city from the south as it deepens its involvement and military command and control of one side in what has become a civil war hoping for billions of dollars in reconstruction contracts and special oil deals from its chosen team set up in eastern Libya.”

Seemingly borrowing a page from the Israeli army media office, NATO’s Carmen Romero, the NATO Deputy Spokesperson and Colonel Roland Lavoie, Operation ”Unified Protector” military spokesperson on August 9 told a joint Brussels-Naples news conference that “the village bombed contained a military assembly area and that NATO to date had no evidence of any civilian casualties but that NATO always takes extraordinary measures to assure the safety of civilians.”

It is predictable that as the evidence of the massacre at Majer becomes public and NATO is pressed to explain the killing of yet more Libya civilians, NATO, probably within the next 48 hours, will announce “an internal investigation” into the events at Majer while asserting in advance, as the Israelis regularly do, that their bombing was only directed at “legitimate military targets.”

Every Muslim and Christian Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, and every Lebanese citizen whose family members or loved ones were slaughtered during Israel’s two massacres at Qana, Lebanon, is reminded today of the indescribable loss suffered yesterday by their Libyan sisters and brothers at Majer, Libya.

The Majer massacre was perpetrated yet again with American weapons once more gifted by American taxpayers without their knowledge or consent and against every American humanitarian value shared by all people of good will.

As at Qana, the inventory of American weapons that has been provided to NATO and available for use here in Libya since March 29, sometimes indiscriminately, in order “to protect civilians” includes, but if not limited to, the following:

• B-2 stealth bombers from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base

• F-15Es currently based at the 492nd Fighter Squadron and 494th Fighter Squadron at RAF Lakenheath, Britain

• F-16CJ “defense-suppression” aircraft based at the 480th Fighter Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany

• EC-130 Commando Solo psychological operations aircraft from the 193rd Special Operations Wing, Pennsylvania Air National Guard, Middletown, PA

• KC-135s from the 100th Air Refueling Wing currently based at Mildenhall, Britain and the 92nd, Air Refueling Wing, Fairchild AFB, WA

• C-130Js recently based at the 37th Airlift Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany

• A-10 attack fighters

• AC-130 gunships.

• The NATO attacks on Libya began with the bombing of claimed Libyan air-defense equipment using 110 American Tomahawk and Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles. Tomahawks were also fired from British ships in the area.

• Also launched were bombing attacks using three American B-2 Spirit Bombers delivering 45 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) against Libyan air bases.

U.S. Navy ships being used by NATO “to protect Libyan civilians” include:

• The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Stout (DDG 55) and USS Barry (DDG 52)

• Submarines USS Providence (SSN 719), USS Scranton (SSN 756) and USS Florida (SSGN 728)

• Marine amphibious ships USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) and USS Ponce (LPD 15)

• Command ship USS Mount Whitney (LCC/JCC 20)

• Support ships Lewis and Clark, Robert E. Peary and Kanawha

• AV-8B Harrier fighters, CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters and MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft aboard the Kearsarge and Ponce

• KC-130J tanker aircraft flying from Sigonella Air Base, Italy

• EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft of VAQ-132, based at Whidbey Island, WA and flying from Aviano Air Base, Italy (the above listed aircraft were diverted from Iraq at NATO’s request “to help protect Libyan civilians”)

• P-3 Orion sub-hunters

• EP-3 Aries electronic attack aircraft.

In addition to the above listed weapons, more than 50 types of American bombs and missiles are stockpiled for NATO use “to protect civilians in Libya” and their use to date is illegal under both American and International law because it has resulted in the killing, maiming, or wounding of approximately 7,800 Libyan civilians between March 29 and August 9, 2011.

A survey of NATO bombing sites, ground inspections, cataloged serial numbers from unexploded ordnance, examination of bomb and missile fragments at civilian sites in Western Libya, and consultation with Libyan military sources confirm what two US Senate Armed Services Committee staffers and international lawyers have postulated. NATO, like their Israeli allies at Qana, Lebanon, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity at Majer, Libya on August 8, 2011.

Specifically, NATO stands accused of committing the following crimes against the people of Libya according to a consensus from meetings with an increasing number of visiting international lawyers and human rights advocates who have come here from Europe, Asia and South and North America.

Applicable international law includes but is not limited to Article 3 of the Statute of The Hague International Penal Court, which clearly states that one criterion for indictment for war crimes is: “Attack or bombardment, by whatever means, against undefended cities, towns, villages, buildings or houses”. NATO’s continuous use of civilian targets for military purposes, a scenario which NATO wantonly and callously calls “collateral damage” fits this clause exactly and would be a cornerstone of a case accusing this organization of being guilty of war crimes.

Violation of the Geneva Convention IV, Article 3 (a): “To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds.”

These are similar causes of action that were filed against Israeli officials by American lawyers at the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights in Ali Saadallah BELHAS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Moshe YA`ALON, Defendant (466 F.Supp.2d 127 (2006)), a case that educated the international legal community and the public about the necessity to strip sovereign immunity from international outlaws and allow lawsuits in domestic as well as international courts.

The NATO massacre at Majer requires international law suits that achieve nothing less.