- (December 2005)
Presidential candidates.
The next presidential elections are still three years away but discontent
with the Bush administration is making many USA citizens dream of who will
be next (and better).
There is no question that three issues are top on the voters' mind: 1. Katrina
(the government proved to be comically inefficient in preventing
a catastrophe and helping its victims), 2. The Iraqi war (that in the eyes of
many has become a self-sustaining mess), 3. Illegal immigration (the USA borders
are wide open to millions of illegal immigrants while efforts are made to
block terrorists from taking a plane).
Other factors could rise in 2006.
The economy does not seem to be much of an issue anymore. Unemployment has
been declining, gas prices have gone down. But a burst of the real estate bubble
could send new shock waves.
Petty crime seems to be on the rise in many cities. This administration has
done a lot less than the Clinton administration to protect ordinary families
against criminals. As thousands of households across the country suffer from
vandalism, theft and burglary, a grass-roots rebellion may be in the making.
Third, health care is becoming prohibitively expensive for everybody, both
individuals and companies. There must be a limit when people stop behaving
like chickens standing in line at the slaughterhouse.
Fourth, as corruption cases continue to mount (Tom DeLay is only the tip
of the iceberg), being associated with Washington could become a bigger and
bigger liability.
Fifth, the government's intrusion in controversial cases such as Terri
Schiavo's have created a general anti-Washington sentiment around the country
of a different kind: the government should mind its business.
After the fundamentalist orgies of the last few years (that peaked with
Kansas' decision to downplay Darwin), moral values are unlikely to be one
of the main concerns of the silent majority.
Unfortunately, neither the death penalty (the USA's shame number one in
the world's eyes) nor guns (the USA's number-one domestic problem) nor oil
(the USA's number-one cause of foreign-policy problems) are likely to
be much of an issue any time soon.
- Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, a Republican: by far, the most admired Republican politician in the USA and abroad
- Former New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani, a Republican: a reassuring figure who is widely identified with common sense, determination and ability to lead, and not contaminated with Washington politics
- Arizona senator John McCain, a Republican: one of the USA's strongest moral voices, who saved the USA democracy at a time when the Bush administration was trying to turn it into a police state.
- New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, a Democrat: the only major politician who has consistently beat the drum of illegal immigration, going as far as to declare a state of emergency (the sensible thing to do when your country is invaded by millions of foreigners)
- Former vice-president Al Gore, a Democrat, who has strongly opposed the war in Iraq and pretty much everything that George Bush II has done as president. He is by far more popular with democrats than, say, John Kerrey.
- New York senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, whose only real merit is to be a celebrity (but celebrities do get elected, even dumb ones like former stripper Schwarzenegger)
- Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001.
- Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, a Republican, the only political figure to benefit from the Katrina hurricane.
- Former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, a Democrat, who is still identified with his campaign against poverty.
- Virginia governor Mark Warner, a Democrat, a respected political insider
- Virginia enator George Allen, a Republican, a respected political insider
- Illinois senator Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan immigrant
However, recent elections prove that it is not the people who decide elections:
the parties have their way to decide what the people must vote.
The will of the people matters less and less in the USA, which has become
de facto a two-party dictatorship.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (December 2005)
Do we trust this country?
Bush and the other members of his administration never miss an opportunity
to emphasize that the security of the world (well, at least the "western" part
of it), and, in general, civilization as we know it, depends on the USA.
Unfortunately, the USA never misses an opportunity to dismay the world with
acts of senseless and reckless stupidity, that make the world wonder what
is better, the problem (e.g., Islamic terrorism) or the solution (the USA).
Stanley Tookie Williams, the co-founder of the notorious "Crips" street gang of
Los Angeles ("notorious" only in the USA), was executed at the much more
notorious San Quentin prison (worldwide "notorious").
The governor of California, Austrian-born stripper, soft-porno star and actor
Arnold Schwarzenegger, refused to grant clemency, despite all sorts of appeal.
Millions of people worldwide watched horrified as the state of California
carried out a cold-blooded murder.
Is this meant to be an example of what the USA means by "civilization"?
When California goes about its business (i.e., its economy sinks lower and
lower), the world hardly pays attention to the name of its governor.
But when tragically grotesque events such as this one take place, the whole
world can't help wondering how in heaven did Californians elect
someone like the "Terminator",
who was known to be as incompetent as any random citizen can be even before
he became governor of the most important state of the USA.
How is the world supposed to trust this country that chooses its leaders
among the dumbest and bloodiest available celebrities (the owner of a
baseball team for president, a Hollywood actor for governor)?
The world is not necessarily terrified by Osama Bin Laden, but it is certainly
terrified at the notion that someone like
Schwarzenegger decides who has to live and who has to die.
And it is certainly terrified by the idea that the defender of "civilization"
is a country that still carries out capital executions, at a rate second only
to mainland China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (December 2005)
Pinter against the USA.
Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (see Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter's anti-American rant), has recently delivered a devastating speech about "the crimes of the USA". He claims that
"US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded,
let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes
at all."
One wonders in which planet he used to live, since the stories of Pinochet in
Chile or the Contras in Nicaragua have been the subject of thousands of books,
dozens of films, and even several investigations by the USA congress (replete
with jail sentences for those who broke the law).
He claims that the facts about the crimes committed by communist regimes are
more widely available and well known. I beg to disagree: I routinely meet
Europeans who have never heard of Stalin's crimes and Mao's crimes, but are
very knowledgeable about Pinochet's coup. In fact, I believe that Pinochet's
regime, and the USA's collaboration with it, is the single best known fact
of post-war history in western Europe, whereas, for example, very few Europeans
know who Pol Pot or Menghitsu were (Pol Pot's regime killed 2 million people,
and Menghitsu one million).
Most Europeans are convinced that
millions of people disappeared in Chile (the real number is 2,000) but
hardly known that anyone was killed by Stalin's or Mao's regime (the numbers
are in the dozens of millions).
We have very accurate headcounts for the people killed by right-wing
dictators (mainly because, outside the Arab world, they have all been
replaced by democratic systems), but we still have only vague knowledge of the
numbers for left-wing regimes (especially those that are still in power, such
as North Korea).
Anyway, He goes on to lay praise on the communist regime of Nicaragua, that
was in his opinion overthrown by the USA (it simply lost every election
since the Nicaraguan people were allowed to vote), and then to quickly
summarized that hundreds of thousands of people were killed by USA-supported
regimes in Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the
Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.
All of which is perfectly recorded, documented and, alas, well-known
(contrary to what he claims is a conspiracy to hide them).
Pinter's rant is typical of today's anti-Americanism. The distortions and
omissions in his speech are emblematic of the system of thought that is
being creted in western Europe and many other places.
- Britain (and every other European power) did exactly the same
(or worse) when it was the most powerful country in the world.
If nothing else, Pinter could
have mentioned that his country set the standard.
- The vast majority of the facts that he reports are, in his
opinion, not well known. Nonetheless, he is talking about them,
and I suspect that his audience of hundreds of millions of
Europeans and hundreds of millions of Americans is perfectly
aware of them. So they are not so unknown as he claims.
- The reason they are not so unknown is that a vast network
of information exists in the USA (starting with the mainstream media)
that has made those facts
known to the whole world. The information about the crimes committed by
the USA (or the regimes it supported) came mostly from
inside the USA itself. Pinter fails to see the difference
between this fact and the fascist and communist regimes.
- Far from being hidden or suppressed, those facts (about the
USA's involvement in war crimes) are far more publicized than
the good that the USA has done. For example, Pinter never
mentions the amount spent by the USA in purely humanitarian
aid to the poor or the sick of the world. Why? Because that one
is, indeed, mostly unknown. What is very known around the world
is precisely the topic of Pinter's speech (America's crimes), which he
claims is not well known.
- Pinter claims that the crimes committed by the USA are not
well known, when in fact they are well known. On the other hand,
he does not spend a single word discussing the least publicized
of all facts: how many people's lives have been saved by the USA?
This is the good old Soviet-style propaganda: the USA nuclear
bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people in Japan.
Nobody argues with this statement.
But how many lives were saved by the nuclear bombs on Japan?
One only has to look at the number of Japanese killed by the
Soviet Union in two weeks, or the number of Germans killed by
the combined allied attack, to realize that a prolonged war
could have killed a lot more Japanese than two atomic bombs.
(Not to mention USA soldiers, of course).
The same reasoning may (may) apply to all the other conflicts that
Pinter accuses the USA of, but Pinter does not spend one second
discussing this little-known fact.
Somehow he thinks that the current civil war in Iraq is hidden
and not well known, when in fact we are shown daily the horrifying images
of the carnage and millions of people march in protest. Is there any day
when one can watch tv and not hear someone criticize the Iraqi invasion?
Somehow he doesn't realize that what is
not well known is the opinion of the Iraqi people, who
keep voting in favor of democracy despite all the terrorists
and all the anti-Americans like Pinter.
How many times have you heard on tv that more Iraqi voters went to vote (despite
the threat of suicide bombers) than Polish voters (and a lot more than in Venezuela)? The turn-out was higher
in the Iraqi elections than in the last European Union elections: you didn't
know this, did you? Pinter has an odd perception of what is well publicized
and what is not.
- Pinter asks "How many people do you have to kill before you
qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?"
An interesting question indeed. The allies who fought against Hitler
killed several million people. Those allies (Britain and USA)
had not been attacked by Hitler. Are Churchill and
Roosevelt to be considered "war criminals"? I guess for Pinter
the answer is "yes". Are the Italian partisans who fought
against Mussolini (and killed many more fascists than fascists
had ever killed dissidents) to be considered "war criminals?
- Pinter notably omits to mention the two biggest carnages carried out by the West after the end of World War II: Algeria and Vietnam. They were both started by France, that also supported all sorts of mad dictators, from Bokassa to Saddam Hussein (and did little to prevent the genocide in Rwanda). One wonders if Pinter is ready to deliver a similarly devastating attack against France, since France is guilty of pretty much the same crimes as the USA.
- He accuses the USA of being indifferent to the number of
people who died, but it seems to me that Pinter is precisely
guilty of the same crime. He is totally indifferent to the
millions killed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and so forth (in fact,
he never mentions them, as if USA foreign policies had nothing to do
with the spread of communism), while, on the other hand, he considers
"mass murder" anything that was done to contain those mass murderers.
- Pinter commits a much bigger crime than any the USA has
committed: he completely ignores the will of the people.
He never bothers for a second to wonder what the people of
Nicaragua or the people of Iraq wanted. If the Sandinistas were such a nice
regime, so much loved by the people, why did they kept the people from voting?
And he seems unimpressed by the fact
that, on the first time they were allowed to speak, the
Nicaraguans voted against the communists.
He commits the worst
of all western crimes: the good old fashioned attitude that
"we western intellectuals known better than you ignorant
colonies". Thus he does not ponder for a second if, by any
chance, the average Nicaraguan wanted the USA to do exactly what it did,
i.e. help the Contras fight the communists.
Nor does he spend one second asking a Kurd or a Shiite whether they wanted
the USA to overthrow Saddam Hussein: he is obviously not interested in
hearing the answer, but only in telling them what "his" opinion on the matter
is. The good old "i know better" attitude.
- Pinter is exemplary of the "relativistic" attitude that would like us to
believe that living in a world dominated by Hitler, the Soviet Union, Osama
bin Laden or the USA does not make much of a difference. They are all mass
murderers anyway. The danger is precisely in this subtle message: that we
might as well return to nazism or communism. More and more people subscrive
to Pinter's views and to his subtle message. Therefore it becomes more
and more likely that, sooner or later, they will indeed go back to nazism
and communism. Which will cause millions of people to flee to the USA and its
allies.
Which will cause the USA to support the cause of those who fight against
those regimes. Which will cause wars all over the world. Which will end with
the victory of the USA and the defeat of regimes hated by their own people.
Which will result in a world dominated by the USA. Which will result in a
new generation of failed intellectuals like Pinter claiming that there is no
difference between the USA and those regimes. Do we really want this cycle to
repeat itself forever?
So who is the real problem in the world? I believe it is "still"
Pinter. What I mean is that Pinter's "we know better" attitude
has been at the source of the vast majority of the problems that
the world is facing (except maybe Islam, which is a mostly
self-created problem). Pinter embodies the western attitudes
that created colonialism, the slave trade, communism, fascism and caused
two world wars and a Cold War.
The tragedy is that he doesn't realize it. Which means that he is likely
to create more problems, while totally convinced that he is solving problems.
(This does not absolve the USA of the crimes and mistakes it committed, of
course. But the USA society is, at least, aware of having committed them, from
Vietnam to Iraq, while Pinter does not seem aware of the tragedies that his
attitude has cost humankind. Thus one tends to trust the president of the USA
better than Pinter. I suspect that most of the world would vote for Bush, the
most hated of all USA presisents, if the alternative was Pinter).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (December 2005)
Unite the USA and Canada
Periodically, the issue of the French-speaking province of Quebec comes up to haunt Canadian politicians.
Somehow English-speaking Canadians are obsessed by the idea of Canada,
a British invention that never had any ethnic, geographic or historical
sense. Quebec has received huge aid from the central government to make
sure that its citizens do not demand a free Quebec. Instead, about half of
its citizens still demand a free Quebec. The reason is very simple: people
who don't want a free Quebec are more likely to migrate somewhere else
than stay in Quebec. The Quebec issue is a lose-lose proposition.
Surprisingly, almost noone in Canada (or the USA, for that matter)
discusses the "USA issue". Instead of stubbornly focusing on keeping Quebec
into Canada, why not contemplate a union with the USA? Isn't it more natural
to unite with a nation that speaks the same language, believes in the same
economic system and is already your main trading partner than with a nation
that insists on speaking a different language, believes in a more
socialist system and is jealous of its identity?
The linguistic issue is becoming comic outside of Quebec because this bilingual
country has now more Chinese-speaking citizens than French-speaking citizens
outside of Quebec: why should the other provinces print laws in English and
French instead of English and Chinese? Other minorities (Indians, for example)
are also multiplying rapidly. The bilingual nature of Canada will soon look
very, very anachronistic.
Americans (those who are citizens of the USA) should also consider the benefits
of a union with Canada. First and foremost, of course, power: the USA would
become an even more impressive world power. Second, it would reverse a
geopolitical trend towards secession (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czech-Slovakia,
Ethiopia-Eritrea, and soon perhaps Iraq) that threatens to create smaller
and less controllable political entities. Third, the economies of Canada and
the USA complement each other almost perfectly: Canada has the resources
that the USA industry needs, and both have the best intellectual power in
the world to manage both resources and industry.
Fourth (and here comes the beef),
Canada enjoys a huge trade surplus with China just when the USA is the victim
of a huge trade deficit with China. Unite the USA and Canada and one gets
the best of both worlds: cheap import Chinese without losing a single penny.
Why would Canada be willing to pay for the USA's debts? Because Canada
would be the first one to suffer if the USA's deficit becomes unmanageable.
Fifth, they are both countries of immigrants, but increasingly different kinds
of immigrants: Canada favors educated high-tech engineers from Asia, whereas
the USA favors cheap laborers from Latin America.
The two complement each other: the USA needs more of the former, and Canada
needs more of the latter. As a matter of fact,
often the former migrate to Canada only to obtain a Canadian passport and
then relocate to the USA, where demand is also high but immigration laws
are a bit silly.
There are, of course, many other benefits. Some of them would not be apparent
to the citizens of the USA, but are indeed valuable to the whole planet:
Canada uses the metric system (a sign of civilization), Canada has abolished
the death penalty (a sign of civilization), Canada is not controlled by
a gun lobby (a sign of civilization), Canada is not controlled by churches
(a sign of civilization), etc.
By looking at their profiles, a citizen of planet Earth tends to trust Canada
as the world superpower better than the USA. Or, put it this way, one is less
alarmed by Canada's domestic curriculum vitae than by the USA's.
The main obstacle to integration of the two nations is not so much the two sets
of values (best exemplified by death penalty, guns and tele-evangelists) but
the attitudes towards foreign policy. Since the end of WW2, the USA has been
forced to take up a role of protagonist in defending and spreading
western civilization. Canadians are much more indifferent towards the destiny
of humankind. They hardly invested in helping defeat communism. If it were
up to Canada, the Soviet Union would still prosper and probably occupy more
than half of the world. Canada has benefited from the world that the USA
created without having to pay a price for creating it: a free lunch.
Even globalization (that has greatly benefited Canada, more than it has
benefited the USA) was pushed through and is defended daily by the USA,
not by Canada.
But this is a danger: the well-being of Canadians has come to depend
too much on the foreign policy of the USA, while Canadians have virtually
no way of influencing it (the USA owes them no debt of gratitude).
Everything is fine as long as the USA's foreign policy has, coincidentally,
the involuntary effect of helping the Canadian economy.
But how long do Canadians want to live gambling on coincidence?
(And, if Canada, why not Australia and New Zealand?)
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (December 2005)
Exporting human rights?
On a sad day for western civilization, the USA carried out the 1,000th execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
This is the same country that lectures China on human rights and
liberates Iraq from a dictator.
Something is very wrong with the USA society if its citizens cannot
see the paradox.
The only countries that execute more people than the USA are China, Iran and
Vietnam: what a company.
The USA is the only western country that still has the death penalty.
A very sad day for the USA and for all western "civilization".
How about importing some human rights from other countries before we export them to other countries?
(To be fair, three southern states, Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma, account for
more than half of the 1,000 executions performed since 1977.
Texas alone has happily carried out 355, making it one of the most murderous
governments in the world).
(And popular support for this barbaric tradition has been falling steadily
over the last few years, despite a blood-thirsty president, although that
has more to do with the advent of DNA testing than with Christian mercy:
DNA testing has proven the innocence of many of the people who were destined
to the electric chair, a fact that makes us wonder how many innocence this
country, defender of human rights, has murdered in the name of justice).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (November 2005)
How to win a war.
There have been many advocates of a USA withdrawal from Iraq, but mainly
anti-war fanatics (which often means pro-dictator fanatics).
A much more serious, credible and clever argument is being advanced by the
influential Democrat and expert of military matters John Murtha,
who originally supported the invasion of Iraq but is now calling for the
immediate withdrawal of USA troops from Iraq.
(See this article)
Murtha demands USA withdrawal from Iraq not on the basis that the USA must cut
and run, but on the basis that a) the USA did accomplish its mission (as Bush
claimed), namely to remove Saddam Hussein from power and declare Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction; and that b) the presence of USA troops in Iraq is "uniting the enemy" (his expression to mean that Islamic fundamentalists, Saddam's
old guard, tribal militia, and many other groups are joining forces despite
their historical differences and distrust).
All the trouble is now limited to the Sunni triangle, with only episodic attacks
in the south and the north. Sure, many Iraqis live in Baghdad, but the area
that the "insurgents" destabilize is (geographically speaking) relatively
small. If the USA left, the Iraqi government (basically run by Shiites and
Kurds) could decide what the Iraqis want to do: a) strike back massively at
the Sunnis for supporting this insurgency, b) split Iraq into three countries,
c) ask for United Nations peacekeeping (including all the countries that
so far refused to help), or whatever else. Basically, the problem would turn
from being a war between the USA and the Sunni Arabs to being a violent
uprising by the Sunni minority.
He makes the case that the USA is, basically, overstaying. The Iraqi people
did welcome the invasion, and did welcome the removal of Saddam Hussein.
But the USA's clumsy attempt to install a democratic regime has simply turned
the tables, painting the USA as the aggressor instead of the liberator.
Polls show that Murtha is largely correct (although noone has proposed a
referendum to ask the Iraqi people what the USA should do, and although the
democratically elected leaders of Iraq have repeatedly begged the USA
to stay a little longer).
Murtha's main point is two-fold: a) the Iraqi troops will never learn to do
their job if all they have to do is call the USA to solve all problems;
b) the anti-democratic front would fragment the moment the USA left Iraq,
and would therefore be easier to control and eventually defeat.
He thinks that a USA withdrawal would make the Iraqi army stronger and would
make the enemies weaker.
It sounds, indeed, like a strong argument.
The key aspect of Murtha's argument that, unlike most anti-war activists and
assorted fans of Saddam Hussein, Murtha has decoupled two completely different
issues: 1. whether it was right or wrong to invade Iraq in the first place;
2. whether it is right or wrong to withdraw from Iraq. Those are two
different issues. Anybody who treats them like the same issue (whether he
is the vice-president of the USA or an anti-war veteran) is partisan (and
therefore not credible) by definition.
There are two reasons to be cautious about withdrawing any troops from Iraq:
a) Murtha might be wrong just like Bush was wrong (we have learned not to
trust USA politicians who tell us they know all about Iraq), and b)
there is no question that all Islamic terrorists will claim victory,
and that the public opinion of the Islamic world (and of the entire
world) will think so too. We know too well what happens when the USA withdraws:
Lebanon, Somalia and Afghanistan are three different stories that have in
common the sudden withdrawal of USA troops or interest. All three fell into
chaos that cost the lives of thousands and offered terrorists a haven.
Lebanon became the training ground for suicide bombers and Afghanistan became
the headquarters of Al Qaeda: the USA paid a dear price too for running away
from its responsibilities. Did Murtha study history? Is Murtha the new Ronald
Reagan, who runs away from wars that are too difficult to win and leaves
future generations to deal with the consequences?
But there is one more reason (that Murtha forgot) for withdrawing: the
withdrawal of the USA troops would force the population people to take a stand.
Right now they can afford to criticize the "occupation" knowing that the
USA is going to stay. They can afford to stay home and ignore the bloodshed
(as long as none of their relatives or friends gets killed); let the USA
do the dirty job and pretend that they have nothing to do with it.
They can play neutral, pretending that they do not side with either camp
(USA or insurgents). If the USA decides to withdraw, the Iraqis will have to
make up their mind which side they are on.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (November 2005)
What google should do.
Google's initiative to create a large digital library by scanning all the books
of the libraries in the world is noble and ambitious, and deserves our
support. But, ultimately, I think that Google is missing something in the
picture.
The most frustrating and depressing fact about the classics of literature
(not the obscure tomes) is that so many of them are not easy to find,
either because they have not been widely
translated or because some of those translations are no longer in print.
Google wants to make them available on the Internet, but the everyperson
(who does not speak all the languages of the world) will not fully benefit.
What we need is not so much access to millions of books, but access to
at least the classics... in our home language. Google would be more useful to
the masses if it made available translations of the classics (just the
classics) in all languages of the world than it will be by making available
millions of books (classic or not) in their original language. Who is going to
read a medieval English book? Only an expert in medieval English literature.
That English is just too difficult to understand for most English speakers,
and beyond comprehension for the rest of humanity.
What we need is a publishing company that will publish (and, please, print
them on paper, since most of us commoners still depend on the printed paper)
the classics of all literatures in (yes) all the main languages of
the world at a price affordable for the masses.
This would:
- give a job to thousand of brilliant graduates from the developing
world and from the developing world who are struggling to make a
living our of their language expertise;
- spread culture and information worldwide, which is still
embarrassingly nationalistic even in the most developed countries
(French students can name several minor French poets of the 19th century,
but have no clue what the Don Quijote or the Orlando Furioso are
about. USA students know by heart terrible poems of the early
USA poets but have never heard of Baudelaire or Rilke).
- foster understanding of foreign cultures (each classic could be
prefaced by an expert who provides adequate introduction to the
cultural background);
- increase the degree of education worldwide.
When Gutenberg invented the press,
the effect on the masses was very small, because the masses (mostly
illiterate) couldn't read his books anyway.
We're in the same situation with Google's
digital world library initiative.
We're all illiterate in the age of globalization.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (November 2005)
Did Bush lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction?
President Bill Clinton in 1998: "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program".
Former vice-president Al Gore in 2002: "We know that Saddam has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
Senator Hillary Clinton in 2002: "In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program."
Senator Ted Kennedy in 2002: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
If Bush lied, he was in good company.
If Bush had wanted to lie about WMDs, all he had to do was to ask the CIA
to plant some anthrax and some radioactive material in Baghdad. Then he would
have gone on tv to say "Ah ah, we found the WMDs!" Bush had full control of
Iraq and could have distorted anything he wanted to. He could have said that
he found WMDs in Saddam Hussein's palace or even in the market of Baghdad.
He could have. But he didn't.
So that is one accusation that does not make sense.
Impeach him for many kinds of wrongdoing
(see Corruption out of control,
Torture,
The real terrorists killing Americans for real, day after day,
The great presidential robbery,
Robbing the poor and the elderly),
but not for lying about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, use them and threatened to use
them again. The inspectors of the United Nations found plenty of them and
documented them.
Whether Saddam Hussein destroyed them or hid them, it was not a lie to claim
that he had them.
The last thing we should do is criticize the USA when it fights dictators.
We only boost the morale of all the other dictators in the world.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (November 2005)
No conspiracy theory?
It is odd how anti-Americans construct the most unlikely
conspiracy theories but miss the most obvious ones.
It is now widely reported that it was Italy (not the USA)
that provided the evidence of Iraq's nuclear program that
convinced Bush of the urgency to topple Saddam's regime.
There was no CIA conspiracy, but there was definitely a
piece of damning information coming from the government of
Italy. Somehow, nobody seems to be interested in
speculating why Italy provided the USA with such evidence,
that eventually led to the invasion of Iraq.
Imagine if that piece of information had come from
Israel...
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (October 2005)
The international war on terrorism
The international war on terrorism was largely an invention of George W Bush. Most of the
world did not perceive any war (just a number of problems, some of them quite
serious, like the "invasion" of western Europe by millions of Muslims). Some
countries (Philippines, India, not to mention Israel)
had been the victims of fundamentalist Islam
or of some other kind of terrorism (Britain, Spain, Italy)
for some decades, but never called it an "international war on terrorism".
Then in 2001 the USA were attacked, and Bush decided that there was now an
"international war on terrorism", similar to World War II.
He now looks like a prophet: "after" his statement, the number of terrorist
attacks by Islamic fundamentalists has not only increased dramatically but
spread all over the world. There is a daily attack in Iraq, there is a weekly
attack in Afghanistan, there is a yearly attack in western Europe, and there
are attacks in Indonesia and Pakistan. Now there is indeed an
"international war on terrorism".
Many Europeans suspect that Bush did it on purpose: the most effective way
to drum up support for his wars of conquest was to make his problem an
international problem. Now that Europeans are targeted too, they are more
likely to show some enthusiasm for his policies.
(If so, it is not working: Europeans look less and less likely to join any
future military initiative by the USA, and they are trying harder and harder
to accomodate their Muslim minorities, almost taking for granted that their
continent "will" eventually become Islamic, and it is just a matter of
deciding how smoothly that will happen).
It is more likely that the USA simply miscalculated. The USA thought that
the same logic that applies to westerners must apply to Arabs. It does not.
The USA thought that removing Saddam Hussein from power was a good action,
and would galvanize the Arabs in favor of the USA, seen as the liberators
the same way that western Europeans saw the USA as a liberator against Hitler
and Mussolini. It did not.
The USA failed to understand that Arabs don't think that way.
(See The Arab mind).
Arabs think that
Saddam Hussein is bad the same way they think that a flood or an earthquake
is bad: it is sent by Allah, and one has to live with it. But even one single
infidel soldier who walks into a Muslim land is a much more serious offense.
Arabs who were indifferent to what Saddam Hussein was doing are definitely
not indifferent at all to an army of infidels entering an Arab country such
as Iraq. Religion matters: the Muslim masses consider an invasion by infidels
as the worst of all crimes, much worse than any problem that these armies
propose to solve. Centuries of Islam have brainwashed the Muslim masses to
think almost only in terms of "us versus them". There is precious little
chance that an Arab would see an invading non-Muslim as a friend, no matter
what this invader is trying to do. You can bring freedom, democracy, justice,
food, money or medicines, but you are, ultimately, an infidel. Most Arabs would
rather do without freedom, democracy, justice, food, money and medicines.
In fact, the Arab masses seem to perceive any democratically elected government
as a puppet of the USA. Their logic is that, by definition, if it was elected
with democratic elections, then it is an un-Islamic phenomenon, it is a form
of government imposed by the infidels on the Islamic world. Democracy itself,
if perceived as coming from the non-Muslim world,
may backfire badly precisely because it is not part of their history and
culture.
So was the invasion of Iraq a mistake? It was the right thing to do: the USA
upheld the values it claims to believe in, and not give in to political or
(worse) religious ideologies. The USA should always fight (not
support) tyrants, period. This sends a clear message to the world.
Was the implementation wrong? Certainly. The USA made some colossal mistakes,
starting with the lack of security after the invasion all the way to the fact
that Iraqis still do not have the water and electricity that they had under
Saddam Hussein. Any anti-American can easily convince millions of Arabs that
the USA's intentions were evil: just look at what they did for the Iraqi
people after the invasion.
Is there a way out of it? Not really. Every time the USA withdraws from
a Muslim land, the fundamentalists (and also the moderates) interpret it as
a defeat by the USA. This perception only encourages more and more Muslims
to take on the holy war against the USA, as it happened after Lebanon and
Somalia.
Islamic fundamentalists do not believe in a western ideology (such as communism
or nazism) but in... God. Thus their logic is based on the will of God: if
the facts show that God wants them to fight a jihad, then they will fight
a jihad. A USA withdrawal would be interpreted as such a sign from God.
Now the USA needs democratic elections to legitimize its course of actions,
and can hope that the Muslim masses will be slowly convinced by the future
if they were not by the past.
Did it backfire? It is hard to answer "no" when thousands of Iraqi civilians
are being killed by the very Islamic fanatics that the invasion was supposed
to prevent from operating in Iraq.
It is hard to answer "no" when thousands of people around the world, from
Madrid to London to Bali to Jedda, have been killed by terrorist attacks.
Bush, who is always out of touch with ordinary people, might be pleased with
the "progress" that is being done, but ordinary people in Europe, the Middle
East, Pakistan, Indonesia and many other places live a much less safe life
than they lived two years ago.
George W Bush's great invention, the "international war on terrorism",
has misfired against the USA and against millions of non-Muslim and Muslim
people around the world. But maybe there was no way to avoid this
confrontation: sooner or later it would have happened anyway.
It is, ultimately, a confrontation between the progressive forces and the
conservative forces within the Islamic world. It is ultimately a civil war
within the Islamic world. (See Decolonization and the Islamic civil war). Now the trick is to be able to help the
"right" side, not the other side. This is where the entire world has reason
to fear:
George W Bush is a man who can start a war, but definitely not a man who
can understand what he has just started.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (September 2005)
Why you shouldn't give any money to the relief effort.
In the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane that devastated Louisiana and
Mississippi, president George W Bush has reacted by asking his father George
Bush and Bill Clinton to collect donations.
As sorry as they are for the victims of the Katrina hurricane, Americans have
to understand that this tragedy could have been prevented and, once it
happened, it could have been dealt with in a much more civilized manner
if the president of the USA had not turned billions of dollars of federal
surplus into trillions of dollars of federal deficit. Now (yet again) he
is begging the American people to pay for the costs that the USA government
(by now completely broke) cannot afford to pay for. By giving money,
Americans will simply help Bush continue his criminal policy of low taxes for
the rich that make the USA more vulnerable to any kind of emergency and
make the poor and the elderly the more likely victims of any economic
downturn.
Americans need to recognize that George W Bush and Congress
caused this tragedy with a
criminal tax cut that left the poor to fend for themselves, while the rich
can watch the scene from their villas and yachts.
Americans need to recognize that George W Bush caused this tragedy with his
criminal budget deficit that left the states to fend for themselves, while
corrupt Washington politicians can hand out billions of dollars in contracts
to the lobbies.
Americans need to recognize that the solution is not to foot the bill that
a corrupt administration cannot afford, but to impeach George W Bush
and replace him with a fiscally responsible president.
If the head of a family wastes all the money s/he gains, the solution is
to replace the head of the family.
Police officers, firemen and coast guards could have been hired, but
there were no funds because the federal government was broke after
Bush's tax cut.
The levees could have been improved, but there were no funds because the
federal government was broke after Bush's tax cut.
(In 2002 the Army Corps of Engineers all but stopped work on sinking levees
because of lack of funds, and the chief of the Corps, who complained against
the Bush administration's decision, was invited to resign, in a scenario eerily
reminiscent of what happened to anti-terrorist experts who warned Bush of
terrorist attacks before september 2001).
Groups of armed men roam the streets of New Orleans overnight, looting the
abandoned stores and houses: these are the friends of president Bush and of
Congress, the beneficiaries of their pro-gun laws, the proteges of the National
Rifle Association.
These are the people for whom the Republican Party asked to make it easier to
buy and carry guns. These are the good customers of the gun industry for which
the Republican Party removed all liabilities.
Today these well-armed thugs own the streets of New Orleans, robbing, killing
and raping.
Tom DeLay's vision at work: a lawless city awash in guns.
Four years after september 11 we hear officials state that the disaster
is made worse by the breakdown of communications. Where have the billions
been spent that were supposed to address precisely these problems in the event
of another terrorist attack?
After the fall of Baghdad the world watched in shock and disbelief as the USA
army was doing nothing to stop the looting and anarchy. The exact same scene
repeated in front of the world's eyes in New Orleans. It is hard to believe
that the Bush administration, as idiotic as it can be, made the same mistake
twice. It is easier to believe in a calculated decision
to sacrifice the lives and possessions of ordinary people. Ordinary people
just don't matter that much to president Bush. Ordinary people are disposable
for the Bush administration.
There is no security for the inhabitants of New Orleans the same way that there
was and is no security for the people of Iraq: the pattern is too obvious to
be mistaken for yet another oversight.
Today there should be a hundred more time people and vehicles and goods
available for the victims of the hurricane, but
there are almost none because the federal government is broke after
Bush's tax cut and Congress' massive robberies.
(See Corruption out of control).
So Bush asks former presidents Clinton and Bush senior to come out and
launch a charity: he wants ordinary Americans (for whom Bush has no sympathy,
respect or sense of duty) pay for this disaster.
Let's show that America cares.
Let's raise taxes dramatically: a 50% increase for the rich, and a symbolic
5-10% for the middle class. This will pay for national security, for social
security, and for any emergency such as the Katrina hurricane.
And the USA will leave the ranks of third-world countries and rejoin the
rank of rich countries.
But also let's remove this president as soon as possible, so he cannot steal the
money faster than it can be used by the needy.
It will only get worse if Americans accept the Bush logic: "I, George W Bush,
give your money to the rich, and when you, the poor of America, need money
because of some tragedy, let's go beg the rest of the country for spare change."
There will be more Katrinas, and there will be more deaths, and there will
be more devastation.
Every state in the Union is in the same situation: safety and security programs
have been cut or shelved for lack of federal funding. Almost every state is
running a deficit and can't afford to spend on preventing problems, since
it doesn't even have enough money to take care of existing problems.
The proper way to solve the problem is to put tremendous pressure on the Bush
administration for an immediate tax hike that will collect more money and
faster than a pathetic relief effort led by two pathetic former presidents.
Then demand the impeachment of the president. While the tax money is distributed
to the needy in Louisiana and Mississippi, get a new president with the
specific goal of balancing the budget and restoring financial responsibility
in Washington. This will not only help the victims of the Katrina hurricane,
but prevent future tragedies like this one, strengthen social security, protect
USA borders, and pay for anti-terrorism.
Congress rushed a $10.5 billion recovery bill to president Bush: more hand-outs
to the Washington lobbies. How much of that money will reach the victims,
and how much will be pocketed by the friends of this corrupt administration?
We have seen this movie before in Iraq, where people still don't have water
and electricity after two years and billions of dollars.
The problem is not a hurricane: the problem is a this class of politicians
who have been in power forever and that
the people seem to have no power to remove (let alone try in a court of law
for high treason). Osama is a terrorist who strikes every so many years.
These are terrorists who strike every single day.
(Note: obviously it is always a very good idea to donate money to reputable
charity organizations who operate worldwide, such as the Red Cross, Oxfam,
Care, etc. It is not a good idea to donate money to the Bush administration.)
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (August 2005)
Hands off the strategic oil reserve.
The Bush administration has been craving for years to deplete the strategic
oil reserve. A natural disaster in New Orleands (the Katrina hurricane) has
given them the perfect excuse to pillage and plunder as they dreamed of doing.
Energy secretary Samuel Bodman ordered to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,
to help refineries hurt by Hurricane Katrina. refineries are precisely the close
friends of the Bush clan who had been clamoring precisely for this move.
The lives of one thousand Americans (the ones who died in the hurricane) are
being exploited by politicians to carry out yet another national robbery.
The strategic oil reserve is there for an emergency situation. There is no
emergency in a country where gasoline costs half of what it costs in Holland
and in Britain. The only emergency is that gasoline (a good that the USA has
to import from enemy territories at a devastating cost of wars and terrorism)
is too cheap in the USA.
Double the price of gasoline (so we have plenty of funds to help hurricane
victims) , outlaw all waste of energy, and increase (not
deplete) the strategic oil reserve.
Next hurricane or earthquake, Bush will tell us that we need to privatize
social security. The least compassionate and most cynical administration of
the last decades does not waste a single pretext to cripple the future of
the USA.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (August 2005)
The difference between Pat Robertson and Osama bin Laden.
Afghanistan-based Muslim fundamentalist
Osama bin Laden has never personally killed an American but has called for
Muslims to kill enemies of Islam.
USA-based Christian fundamentalist
Pat Robertson does the exact same thing, except that he is calling for the
assassination of enemies of the USA, not Islam (recently he called for the
assassination of the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Chavez).
Osama bin Laden has encouraged terrorism that serves the cause of Islamic beliefs.
Pat Robertson does the exact same thing, encouraging violence against abortion clinics and doctors.
Osama bin Laden founded an organization, Al Qaeda, to carry out the Islamic struggle.
Pat Robertson founded an organization, the Christian Coalition, to carry out the Christian struggle.
Osama bin Laden used charitable funds to arm Al Qaeda and other armed groups.
Pat Robertson used charitable funds to help the NRA, one of the most powerful
Osama bin Laden favos guns, violence and the death penalty.
Pat Robertson favos guns, violence and the death penalty.
Their language is strikingly similar.
Their actions are strikingly similar.
Their organizations are strikingly similar.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, Pat Robertson also has a strong influence on the president
of the USA, who got elected thanks to the votes of the Christian Coalition (not
of Al Qaeda). That is the only significant difference between the two.
By calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez,
Pat Robertson has just proven to the world that the Islamic world is not the
only region to have a problem with fundamentalists.
What a gift to the enemies of the USA.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (August 2005)
Able Danger
The september 11 attacks promise to become as controversial an event as the
assassination of John Kennedy.
The september 11 commission was supposed to have thoroughly investigated all
the sources of information related to the terrorist attacks.
Apparently, a small detail was kept from them.
The New York Times
(See Able Danger)
now reveals that in 1999 the Clinton administration had created
"Able Danger", a top-secret military unit in charge of fighting Al Qaeda.
This unit realized that a dangerous terrorist, Mohammad Atta, was in the
USA and had created a cell of terrorists determined to strike in the USA.
"Able Danger" correctly identified three more Arabs as terrorists: these men
went on to carry out the september 11 attacks with Atta.
This happened one full year before the 11th of september 2001.
In 2000
this information was not shared with the FBI because lawyers in the
Department of Defense decided that it was not fair for a military unit
to spread incriminating information about a man (terrorist Atta) who was
residing legally in the USA.
These lawyers enforced a principle that is dear to the Left: protecting the
privacy and the rights of citizens. Somehow they extended this principle to
foreigners. Obviously they may have been competent about the USA constitution,
but they did not have a lot of common sense.
Somehow it was also decided that the september 11 commission should not be
told too much about Able Danger. It was never mentioned during the hearings.
It does not surface in their report. Nowhere does one read that in 2000 the USA
government (under Bill Clinton) was aware of the existence of Al Qaeda
terrorists in the USA.
Not believing in conspiracy theories, I think that this is a case of
a democracy shooting itself in the foot. During a decade of real wealth
creation, the USA was busy increasing the rights of its citizens.
Enemies of democracy took advantage of this new
level of freedom to strike at the USA.
This will remain a fundamental issue. As long as parts of the world are
not democratic, the democratic countries will be vulnerable to people and
regimes that do not comply with the same rules of behavior.
The solution is not to reduce the rights of citizens in democracies, but
to force democratic change in the rest of the world.
Hopefully, the lawyers who protected Atta, and basically allowed him to continue
plotting the september 11 attacks, have since been barred from practicing law.
And so should all other lawyers who behave
That is the other major weakness of democracies: a class of subhuman
lawyers who are too busy winning a case for the sake of winning the case, and
neglect what the utmost interest of their community and of their country is.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (August 2005)
Another boom of immigrants
It has become popular outside the USA to predict the decline of the USA as
a superpower, a power, a state, anything. One of the reasons would be the
decline in immigration, the traditional reservoir of brains that has helped
the USA stay ahead of the competition.
Scientific American of August 2005 (page 25) reveals that it may be just the
opposite: immigration into the USA has been booming since the 1960s. And,
unlike previous waves of immigrants, this one seems to be bringing in a higher
percentage of educated people: 3.3% of adult immigrants hold a PhD, as
opposed to 2.2% of USA natives.
What has changed is their origins: instead of Europe, now they come from
Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Half of the population growth in the USA is due to immigration.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (July 2005)
Corruption out of control.
Republicans control both houses and the presidency. As it is often the case
in cases (dictatorships or democracies) in which one side has absolute power,
this fact is costing USA citizens trillions of dollars in blatantly corrupt
laws.
Two examples stand out in July 2005. CAFTA was meant as
a free trade agreement with five small countries in Central America. Nothing
wrong with that. But it turned out to be a 1,000 page document that virtually
nobody read, except the few Democrats who desperately tried to bring its
contents to the attention of the media: those 1,000 pages are a long litany
of benefits and privileges for the lobbies that support the Republican Party.
There is very little free trade in CAFTA, but a lot of favors handed out
to big donors. The few Republican senators and representatives who bothered
to address the concerns of the Democrats simply claimed that CAFTA was good
for the American worker. It doesn't take a genius to realize that CAFTA, like
any other free-trade agreement, helps corporations move jobs where salaries
are cheaper, and that does not translate into "the USA". Workers are certainly
going to lose, both in the short term and in the long term. CAFTA makes them
as poor or poorer than the workers in the CAFTA countries. The other concerns
raised by Democrats were never addressed by anyone. The Republicans had the
majority to pass the law, and one day they did so: most of them had never
heard a single word of the debate; many of them were bribed by party leaders
into voting for the bill in exchange for other favors.
Then came the bill on medical malpractice. Republican leaders claimed that it
was a bill to defend the rights of consumers. That is another blatant lie:
there are hundreds of pages in the bill that protect drug manufacturers,
hospitals and doctors, but there is nothing in the bill that protects consumers.
Consumers are clearly the victims: the bill gives more power to companies
and hospitals to do whatever they want. Again, very few Republicans listened
to the complaints raised by Democrats. In fact, the Republican majority voted
to prohibit a vote on some of the issues related to this bill. The Democrats who
tried to protest where silenced by the "chair".
Republican leaders asserted that this bill will lower the rates paid by
consumers for health insurance: health insurance companies themselves have
responded that they have no intention of doing so. If the goal was to lower
rates, why not write it in the bill? Something like "this law will automatically
expire if the average cost of health insurance to consumers does not decrease
by 10% a year". Why claim that this law will lower costs for consumers, when
in fact it will not?
All of these robberies are being carried out by the White House and Congress
while president Bush is claiming that social security is broke and there isn't
any money to pay pensions and health care to the elderly and the needy.
This medical malpractice bill, passed with almost no debate, is another gigantic
gift to the lobbies that helped the Republican Party.
Last but not least is Tom DeLay's pet project: handing a gun to every
criminal or terrorist who wants one.
In a dramatic win for what is de-facto the largest terrorist organization in
the world, the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party passed a bill
(the "gun industry liability bill")
that will shield gun makers, dealers, distributors and importers from
liability lawsuits. In other words: "make whatever gun you want, sell it to
whatever organization you want, let them kill as many Americans as they want,
and never be afraid of anyone suing you".
Again, procedural maneuvering was used by the Republicans to keep Democrats
from proposing amendments that would have hurt the bribing parties, sorry,
I mean the lobbies that support this bill. To prove on whose side these
Republicans are even to the last staunch Republican supporters, the Senate
Majority Leader postponed voting on an urgent anti-terrorism bill in order
to more urgently vote to protect gun manufacturers and gun dealers and
killers of USA citizens in general. Get it? On one hand, they stop any
measure to protect USA citizens, while at the same time they pass a law
to increase as much as possible the number of USA citizens who will get
killed. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out what the motives of
these conspirators are. Whether they are active members of Al Qaeda or not,
they share the same goal as Al Qaeda: kill as many USA citizens as possible.
And, to cap a month of generalized robbery, Congress passed a huge
transportation bill (with 412 votes against 8), containing a record 4,000
earmarks, that distributes more than 6,000 public works projects
(i.e. money) to every single Congressional district in the USA.
(No less worrisome are the incompetent cronies who have been appointed by Bush
to important jobs only because they are friends or relatives of influential
figures. An unknown Julie Myers is in line to run a 20,000 people operation
in the Department of Homeland Security: there is nothing in her resume to
suggest that this young woman has the experience or the knowledge required,
but she is, coincidentally, the niece of general Richard Myers and the wife of
an influential Homeland Security official. The chronic cronysm of the Bush
administration has created a USA government that is riddled with
incompetence and corruption).
It is worrying that the Republican Party keeps using its absolute power to pass
laws that hurt workers and consumers and jeopardize the lives of
ordinary Americans Under the pretense of helping workers and consumers,
laws that are simply favors handed out to the lobbies
that pay the highest bribes.
And, in case you are wondering, yes, despite all the scandals,
Tom DeLay still has his job, proudly
representing all the most dangerous lobbies in the countries, and, lo and
behold, he was one of the main proponents of these bills.
Osama bin Laden must be proud of Tom DeLay.
Unfortunately, at the end of the day, one must recognize that it was the
American people who voted these crooks and liars into power.
USA voters are getting what they voted for.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (July 2005)
Shut down the Internet.
For many years, the Internet was paradise on Earth. It was easy and painless.
It was free to send a message to the other side of the globe. There were
bulletin boards where information could be exchanged with absolute strangers.
Then one day Netscape changed all of them. Cursed may that day be.
As it became successful, and millions of people worldwide started
using it, the Internet turned into a Wild West in which all sorts of abuses,
mass mailings and copyright infringements are allowed.
Spam has been the first villain (after the viruses and worms, of course).
Apparently, countless companies are willing to annoy millions of potential
customers (who will thus never become their customers) and have a spammer
send them some kind of unsolicited commercial advert. Spam has become such
a big problem that governments carefully avoid facing it.
Recently, in response to spam, an even bigger problem has emerged: the anti-spam
services. There are services like the infamous spews.org (possibly the most
arrogant and fascist service ever invented on the Internet)
that simply compound
the problem by letting just about everybody list an address as a spammer.
I can list your address as a spammer just for fun, and your emails will be
rejected by millions of computers around the world. Spews' terrorist campaign
is perfectly legal: they don't block your email, they simply provide the tools
for someone else to block your email. After someone has blocked your email,
it is your problem to prove that you are not a spammer: guilty until proven
innocent. Sounds unconstitutional? On the Internet, the Constitution is a
piece of paper.
Basically, the whole culture of anti-spam has become the world's biggest
spammer.
(Why did I use the word "fascist"? Because their philosophy is very similar
to the good old philosophy of lynching).
Individuals routinely steal material from other websites. It is easy and
de facto safe to steal other people's texts: the chances of being caught are
almost zero, and, even if the author catches you, how can s/he prove that
s/he was the one who originally wrote that text? Even if she does manage to
prove it, what can she do to force you to remove your page? Websites such as
lycos and tripod have a vested interest in people infringing copyrights and
stealing text: their revenues (and thus their existence) depends on traffic,
and traffic is increased if their customers steal interesting texts (because
search engines will send more visitors to them). Lycos/tripod apply the same
logic that money laundering banks apply: they don't commit the actual crime,
but they profit from the crime being committed. No surprise that they de facto
encourage copyright infringement by punishing not the thief but the victim:
if you tell them that your text has been stolen by one of their customers,
they will ask you to fill a complex form providing all sorts of evidence
that the crime really happened. Imagine if one million lycos customers
stole your text: are you going to fill one million forms? Even one is enough
to discourage you forever from complaining ever again.
What is the solution to this increasing anarchy? Shut down the Internet.
Intranets work quite well. Let Intranets prosper and then let them find
a way to create a new Internet (the net of all Intranets) that would not
have a problem with spam (and with antispam services) and would punish
copyright infringements instead of encouraging them.
As it is today, the Internet is becoming a problem, not a solution, and
the people who are making money out of this problem have a vested interest
in making it a bigger problem. There will be more services like Lycos
protecting criminals, and there will be more services like Spews blocking
email addresses. They are not liable, thus they will keep doing what they
are doing.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (June 2005)
The 9/11 Families and the ideology of no prevention.
The USA is a country that still tolerates the death penalty, but does
precious little to remove the cause of murder (the highest rate in the
western world).
The USA is a country that has developed the most sophisticated medicines
to protect people from heart attack but does precious little to educate
its people about healthy diets and exercise.
In other words, the USA is a country that never quite believed in prevention.
The USA leaves one free to commit pretty much any crime, while it promises
severe punishment to those who commit those crimes.
The deterrence is in the punishment, not in prevention.
Ask any USA teenager why he shouldn't rape a girl or rob a bank, and the
answer will be: "because otherwise I go to jail".
Needless to say, this ideology of no prevention does not work too well.
The USA ends up having the highest rate in the world of high-school shootings.
Needless to say, they mostly happen in the "heartland", and, needless to say,
parents of those kids inevitably wonder "how could it happen to us?"
It doesn't take a genius, but it does take a mentality geared towards
prevention, otherwise they will never find the answer.
The USA is a country that does not prevent ills from happening: it creates
remedies to those ills "after" they have happened. Which means, of course,
that they "will" happen.
Many families of victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks are
complaining that Bush hijacked the 9/11
terrorist attacks to declare war on Iraq, when Iraq had "nothing to do"
with 9/11.
This is precisely another case of Americans not believing in prevention.
Have these families ever asked themselves: what would have prevented 9/11?
The answer is quite simple: removing the Taliban from power before, not
after, Taliban-protected terrorists attacked the USA.
The USA was guilty of tolerating one of the most brutal regimes in the
world, a regime that preached war to non-Muslims and that harbored Osama Bin
Laden, a man who had openly (not secretely) declared war on the USA.
Again, it doesn't take a genius: 9/11 was the direct consequence of the fact
that the USA did not do enough to prevent it. In fact, it did almost nothing.
As usual, the reaction was punishment: the USA punished the Taliban by bombing
them out of power. But punishment does not bring back the 3,000 people who
died on September 11. What would have saved those 3,000 people is if the
USA had removed the Taliban from power "before", not "after", the fact.
Thus it would have been right (not wrong) to prevent September 11 by removing
the Taliban from power before they could do any harm (to their own people and
to the rest of the world). Thus the wrong thing to do is to wait until one is
attacked. Thus the USA should remove from power every sworn enemy of the USA
before such enemy strikes. Thus removing Saddam Hussein from power was an
excellent idea, in fact the first good idea the USA had in a long time, and
one of the few cases in which the USA used the ideology of prevention, not
the ideology of no prevention.
The fact that now so many Americans complain about the only time in ages when
the USA has "prevented" a problem instead of just waiting for it to happen
explains why the USA usually does not prevent them: because it is the people,
not the politicians, who are opposed to prevention. It is the American people
who want a problem solved only "after" it has happened. If it has not
happened, then there is no problem to solve, then Americans are opposed to
trying to prevent it.
It is the American people who favor retaliation over prevention.
One relative of a victim of September 11 complained that there is still noone
who took responsibility for the failure to prevent September 11. How about
buying a mirror and staring into it for a while?
Ultimately, the people who are responsible for September 11 are all the
Americans who oppose preventing trouble;
all the Americans who are in favor of acting only "after" the USA has
been attacked, only after 3,000 people have been killed. Those people
were killed because so many Americans do not believe in prevention.
Those people were killed by their own relatives.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (June 2005)
Condoleeza Rice, prophet.
"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability
at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we achieved
neither". Thus spoke Condoleeza Rice, USA secretary of state in 2005.
Her words sound like a scathing indictment of the presidents of the past,
of the pragmatic policies of the Cold War era.
Rice may go down in history as the first politician since Gandhi
to deserve a place of honor among the prophets of world peace.
It took a woman, and a black woman, to do what so many white
men had failed to do in the USA.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (May 2005)
Torture.
We thought that, after the horrors of World War II, western civilization had
disposed of torture, once and forever. Instead, at the first test, the leader
of the West has simply returned to torture.
On 15 December 2002 the Washington Post reported that
prisoners at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan were being tortured.
On 6 February 2003 Newsday reported that Guantanamo detainees were being
transferred to Egypt where they were being tortured.
On 9 March the New York Times published a similar report with more details.
On 19 October 2003 the Associated Press reported that eight marines were being investigated about mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq.
In april 2004, CBS' program "60 Minutes" broadcast photos of prisoners
who were tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison, run by the USA.
A few days later, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker published a detailed account
of torture at Abu Ghraib.
in july 2004, the New England Journal of Medicine reported that psychiatrists and psychologists had used psychological torture in Guantanamo.
In november 2004 the Associated Press obtained letters by FBI agents denouncing
"highly aggressive" interrogations at the Guantanamo military base.
In february 2005 the Associated Press revealed the existence of videos
of torture at Guantanamo, based on a report written by investigators from the Southern Command in Miami.
On 20 May 2005, the New York Times published a summary of a confidential
army report, detailing how Afghani prisoners had been tortured at the Bagram
military base run by the USA.
In May 2005, Newsweek published an article about USA interrogators desecrating the Quran (a holy book for Muslims) in Guantanamo.
On 25 May 2005 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published an FBI document dated from 2002 that already detailed how copies of the Quran were flushed into toilets.
In June 2005, a USA military inquiry found that guards or interrogators at Guantanamo Bay "desecrated" the Quran on purpose.
(Well, this is not really "torture", and the outcry has been wildly exaggerated:
if we flushed Gospels or Buddhist scriptures down the toilet no media would
deem it worth reporting it).
More seriously, on 24 May 2005, Amnesty International published a report
denouncing the use of torture by the USA army.
In june 2005, Time magazine published a report on abuses at Guantanamo.
On June 13, Time Magazine published a logbook tracing the inhumane treatment
of a Guantanamo detainee (including Christina Aguilera's songs).
On August 3, the Washington Posto published a report on how American interrogators tortured and killed a 56-year old Iraqi general in november 2003. (The cover up was no less appalling: "military officials issued a news release stating that the prisoner had died of natural causes after complaining of feeling sick". Even worse is the fact that the USA claimed to have captured
the general, when in fact the general walked into a USA military base to
surrender).
On the second of november 2005,
the Washington Post reported that the CIA was using
Soviet-era concentration camps in eastern Europe to "interrogate" terrorists.
The bad news? Torture is used by the USA military in so many different places
that it is difficult to believe this was not tolerated (if not ordered) by
Washington. At least Rumsfeld, if not Bush in person, should resign.
The good news? All of these scandals were uncovered by Western (and mostly USA)
media.
(Note of december 2005: both houses of the U.S. Congress were working on
a law, sponsored by Republican senator John McCain, that would explicitly ban
cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of foreign terrorism suspects.
Unfortunately president Bush still opposed any such ban, thus confirming that
he was in favor of torture, against the will of his own parliament and his
own nation).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (May 2005)
The real terrorists killing Americans for real, day after day.
The most corrupt Congress in memory has passed all sorts of laws that
benefit anyone wanting to commit a violent crime (and protects the people who
gave him the weapons from being sued).
The main sponsor of these laws (which amount to a veritable extermination
campaign against USA citizens) is the National Rifle Association, based,
believe it or not, in the USA.
Now the NRA even opposes preventing terror suspects from purchasing firearms.
Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, who has been instrumental in making guns more readily available to criminals and terrorists, said of people on the terrorist watchlist: "These people haven't been indicted for anything: they haven't been convicted of anything.
Believe it or not, membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit
a person from buying a gun in the USA. Bush is perfectly happy with this,
Congress is perfectly happy with this, and gun manufacturers are very happy
about this. The more Americans are killed, the better business will be for
all of them: NRA, gun manufacturers and politicians (who are, of course,
on the payroll of these amoral business men).
USA taxpayers spend billions of tax dollars to fight terrorism in Afghanistan
and Iraq when the real terrorists are in their backyard.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (May 2005)
Guantanamo or How to lose the war on terrorism.
The USA has been detaining dangerous terrorists at Guantanamo, a military base
located outside the USA. In theory, this should all be hardcore Al Qaeda
fighters.
Erik Saar, who used to work there, is now telling a different story
(in his book "Inside the Wire").
First of all, few of the people detained at Guantanamo belong to the top
echelons of Al Qaeda. Many were totally innocent and were sent back home.
Some were handed over by Afghani warlords to the USA in return for cash
rewards, and the USA is still trying to find out if these are truly terrorists
or simply a way to get money from gullable American agents.
Over two years, the USA has gained little or no information from the
interrogation of these detainees. On the other hand, it has managed to
offend a lot of innocent Afghanis and their families, precisely the people
whose help the USA needs to capture the real terrorists.
People who have read books on how Hitler handled the concentration camps
will be appalled to note so many similarities. Sure, there are no gas
chambers in Guantanamo: but there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz either...
at the beginning.
Osama must love what the USA does in Guantanamo: it justifies everything he
says about the USA.
It is time to dismantle this shameful idea, fire the people responsible
(including the president) and apologize. This is not what the USA stands for.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (April 2005)
The prospering market for nuclear technology
The West is quick to take on Islamic countries when someone in those
countries does something wrong.
In the USA, several right-wing politicians have asked for massive
retaliation against Pakistan for the crimes committed by their nuclear
scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan,
who sold nuclear secrets to both Libya and North Korea.
Very few politicians have asked for retaliation against Israel or
South Africa in the new case of nuclear trade.
USA prosecutors have unveiled the smuggling of nuclear technology
by an Israeli businessman, Asher Karni, who lives in South Africa.
He has already pleaded guilty to selling USA-made equipment both to Pakistan
and India.
Both the Khan and the Karni cases have revealed the existence of an extensive
network of middlemen and black marketeers that includes citizens of several
Western countries.
The problem is not Pakistan: the problem is greed.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (February 2005)
The great presidential robbery.
After causing the biggest recession in modern history and the biggest
budget deficit of all times, Bush has found a simple way to pay for it:
cancel the federal programs for the poor. His policies have increased the
number of poor people in the USA to a level unknown to other western
democracies, and now he simply plans to let them die as quickly as possible,
by removing all the federal programs that keep those families alive.
Why not just shoot them, Mr President?
The president knows well that 40 million Americans have no health care.
Many die (especially children) because they can't afford decent health care
that is available for free in other countries. Many end up in debt for the
rest of their lives, simply because they got sick once. Bush has never done
anything to solve this problem. He has made it worse. Now he wants to make sure
that the people caught into his loop of increasing poverty will simply get
out of the way: die as soon as possible.
The USA is experimenting a cruel new world, one in which rich people will
be able to live almost indefinitely thanks to medicine but in which the
life expectancy for poor people will decrease dramatically, as they are left
with no medical help (due to skyrocketing costs) and no pension (due to the
de-facto abolition of social security).
This is what he means by proposing to abolish unnecessary federal programs.
The biggest "federal programs" are the tax cuts for rich people that
Bush enacted early into his first term. If he wants to cut some
totally unnecessary "federal programs", start by repealing those tax cuts:
it would be enough to save all the programs for the poor and (lo and
behold) to fic the budget deficit.
BUsh is asking the poor to sacrifice, but what sacrifice is he asking from
the rich? Why only the poor have to sacrifice? Why do they have to sacrifice
so that the rich get a trillion dollar tax cut?
THe budget deficit was not created by unnecessary federal programs, but by
president George W Bush. He now wants the poor to pay for his follies,
basically with their lives.
This is not all so different from genocide (a word that Bush often uses
to describe the USA's enemies).
The cruelty of this president has few precedents in American history.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (February 2005)
How Bush handed Osama a victory.
In retrospect, Osama was lucky.
Bush had just antagonized the world by rejecting the Kyoto
treaty, the ABM treaty and the world court. He then proceeded to deride the
United Nations as "irrelevant". His vice-president, Dick Cheney, looked like
a corrupt Richelieu, replacing the enlightened Al Gore who had shaped the Kyoto
protocol. Rumsfeld insulted everyone who dared disagree with him on Saddam's
weapons of mass destructions or winning the peace in Iraq.
As a result, Osama achieved more than he was hoping for. Thanks to Bush's
arrogance, the September 11 terrorist attacks ended up isolating the USA and
making each and every American in the world a terrorist target, from Bali to
Kuwait. The main effect of Bush's foreign policy had already been a big loss
of credibility by the USA: the aftermath of the terrorist attacks simply
increased that decline of credibility
(See Rumsfeld).
The isolation of the USA is not necessarily
due to disagreement on what is the right or wrong action, but on the mistrust
that the entire world has for anything Bush claims.
Antagonizing the world could have been ok if the USA did not need the world.
Unfortunately, in 2001 Bush had just created a huge budget deficit by cutting
taxes for the rich. After september 11, the USA needed the rest of the world,
both to finance its debt and to help in the military operations.
Bush found noone willing to help, given the way he had treated them.
Osama was lucky to find a USA president who had
presided over 152 executions in his six years as Texas governor, almost all of
them poor people who could not afford a good attorney. By applying
the same logic (that the lives of poor people are worthless), Bush
proceeded to eradicate the Taliban and Saddam Hussein with "surgical strikes"
that left thousands of civilians dead. In the minds of millions of Muslims,
this carnage legitimized, after the fact,
the crime that Osama had committed. To many Muslims, it now looks like Osama
is the hero who punished the USA for the thousands killed in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
See also: How did we fail so badly? A report from a trip to the Middle East
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (February 2005)
The test for Transformational Diplomacy.
Condoleeza Rice's "transformational diplomacy" is probably the most significant
development in political science since the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the USA's diplomacy was mainly a diplomacy of
"containment" of the Soviet expansion.
Rice has been articulating a strategy that gives the USA the mission of
transforming the world, not just "defending the free world".
Bush's january 2005 speech to the Nation was simply a summary of Rice's
strategy, aimed at creating popular support for what has never been the role
of the USA: "creating" (not just defending) the free world.
In Bush's words, the new goal of the USA is fighting tyranny, anytime anywhere.
Thus the "war on terrorism" has turned into a "war on tyranny".
(Bush's speech was notable for not mentioning Iraq or Afghanistan at all).
This open declaration of war on tyranny has the side effect of defining, once
and forever, the gap between the USA and the French-German axis: the USA (and
some European countries such as Britain and possibly Italy and Poland) is
determined to force tyrants out of job whereas France and Germany would rather
coexist with them (the traditional western approach to "containment").
There is now a clear contrast: France-Germany's tolerance of tyranny versus
the USA's tyranny of tolerance. The USA is the world tyrant (as the French and
German masses correctly stated during their routine protest marches), a tyrant
that wants to force the whole world to adopt political tolerance. Needless to
say, this amounts to a vow of permanent war and instability, until all tyrants
are deposed. This represents
a Copernican change from the old stance, still advocated by France and Germany,
to tolerate the tyrants in return for peace and stability.
In a way, Condy Rice's transformational diplomacy resembles Trotsky's "permanent
revolution", save that it aims at installing democratic regimes, not communist
ones. The French-German approach, which was also the old USA approach, is an
"evolutionary" approach, whereas Condy rice's approach is "revolutionary".
Right or wrong,
France and Germany represent a west that has remained in the stage of diplomacy
of the Cold-War era, whereas Condy Rice's diplomacy is a bold step in a new
direction, towards a new kind of diplomacy.
Within the USA itself this marks a historical change. Compare with the Sixties,
when idealists were protesting USA support for tyrants, while the USA government
was engaging in "realpolitiK' around the world: now it is the USA government
that has become the "idealist" and it is the intellectuals
marching in the streets demand "realpolitik".
At the same time, Rice is merely expressing a fact that has been part of the
history of the USA for at least a century: the USA has always caused
"transformation". The USA changed the world with each and every war
(World War 2, the Cold War, the Islamic wars). Each victory had the effect of
turning the world into a friendlier and friendlier place for the USA.
At the end of World War 2, the USA "transformed" western Europe from a hotbed
of warring dictatorships into a model of peaceful democracies. At the end
of the Cold War, the USA transformed eastern Europe into the vanguard of
capitalistic democracy.
The Islamic wars are now changing the Middle East in a similar way.
Each of this transformations gave the USA an advantage, because it removed
enemies and increased the number of countries that would never attack the USA.
It also made it easier for the USA to do what they do best: business.
In the end, each victory increased the superpower status of the USA not so
much because of the weapons that the USA built but because the
circumstances became more and more favorable.
Rice has merely taken the historical record of the past and turned it into a
dogma for the future.
Rice's main obstacle is her boss: Bush is chronically out of touch with ordinary
people, whether Americans or Iraqis. Bush is the last person who can "sell"
a transformational diplomacy to the world. Rice also has to convince the world
that supporting the royal Saudi family or selling weapons to Mubarak or shaking
hands with Qaddafi are acts consistent with her "transformational diplomacy":
to most of us, they still look like the old "realpolitik".
At the senate hearings for her confirmation, Rice said that it is impossible to
negotiate with Iran because a) it wants to destroy Israel, a democracy and
friend of the USA, b) it supports terrorism, and c) it is undercutting USA peace
efforts in the region. Can someone please explain what is the difference with
China, that a) wants to destroy Taiwan, a democracy and friend of the USA,
b) supports the terrorist regime of North Korea, and c) undercuts USA peace
efforts in the region?
Why is the USA funding the economic boom of China while it refuses to negotiate
with Iran?
This kind of inconsistencies only fuel Arab mistrust of USA diplomacy.
The first task for Condoleeza Rice will be to restore trust in USA diplomacy,
and the only way to do it is to put your guns where your mouth is: impose
sanctions against China until China becomes a democracy
and stops threatening its democratic neighbors.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (January 2005)
Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the most mistaken men ever.
Remember when he predicted that a tall Arab with a huge bounty on his head
(Osama bin Laden) would not be free for long? Well, he is still free three years
later. Remember when Rumsfeld said that Osama was "freezing his butt in a cave"?
Well, Osama looks in pretty good health in his recent videos, shot in places
that look a lot more comfortable than caves.
Remember when Rumsfeld described the high-tech bunkers that Osama was supposed
to have in Afghanistan? Never found one: Osama's caves were just that, caves.
Remember when Rumsfeld predicted that millions of Iraqis would welcome the USA
troops? Not quite right.
Remember when Rumsfeld said that
the USA soldiers killed in Iraq were victims of a "spike" in violence? Well, the
spike has been spiking for almost two years now. Remember when Rumsfeld insulted
"old Europe" for not believing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?
Well, guess what: "old Europe" was right.
How can such an incompetent man, who has been proven wrong so many times on such
crucial issues, be still in charge of the most powerful army in the world?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (January 2005)
Robbing the poor and the elderly.
Bush seems obsessed with the idea of privatizing social security, despite
the fact that nobody in his own party is excited about it. The reason
noone is excited is very simple: there is nothing to fix. The Congressional
Budget Office (run by people appointed by Bush himself) estimate that
social security as it is will be solvent till 2052.
This is, to say the least, intriguing. Why would a president who
doesn't care about the trillion dollars of budget deficit he created (that
future generations will have to pay) care so much about a problem that
will not exist for 47 years?
One answer is in the beneficiaries. Bush's privatization scheme will benefit
the same wealthy class that already benefited from Bush's previous robbery,
the trillion dollar tax-cut for the rich. Who will pay for Bush's privatization
scheme? As usual, the middle class. Bush is suggesting to pay for the cost
of privatizing social security by lowering benefits: social security is not
broken today, but it will be after Bush "fixes" it.
Get it? He wants to solve a problem that does not exist by creating it.
Under the excuse that there is a problem, Bush wants to introduce a new system
that will cost so much that it will lower social security benefits for the
poor.
If the president hates the poor so much, why not just shoot them all?
After all, that is precisely what he did when he was governor of Texas
and sent 152 low-income convicts to die, all of them guilty of not having
money to hire a good attorney.
How can American voters be so dumb to reelect a president who basically
promised to rob them?
TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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