by Prof. James Petras
www.GlobalResearch.ca

(Editor’s note: Read this and spread it widely. Before you begin reading, you may not realize how desperately bad this potential war will be. We have talked about how the Dollar will collapse from either (1) China’s efforts to dethrone the Dollar as world reserve currency, or (2) the Euro’s collapse which will take the Dollar with it. But I have not factored in war in the Middle East. I will now. The first wave of war that Professor Petras speaks of may collapse the world economy, but China and Russia will remain on the sidelines during initial hostilities. If it goes badly for Iran, expect them both to jump in. Perhaps the Biblical prediction of the Battle of Armageddon will come true.)

Introduction

The mounting threat of a US-Israeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by US and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists and security officials by proxy and/or terrorist groups under US or Mossad control, (5) the failure of economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion, (6) escalating hysteria and extreme demands for Iran to end legal, civilian use-related uranium enrichment, (7) provocative military ‘exercises’ on Iran’s borders and war games designed for intimidation and a dress rehearsal for a preemptive attack, (8) powerful pro-war pressure groups in both Washington and Tel Aviv including the major Israeli political parties and the powerful AIPAC in the US, (9) and lastly the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Obama’s Orwellian Emergency Decree, March 16, 2012).

The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ with a handful of marginal ‘knowledgeable academics’ (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.

Needless to say the pronouncements of the ‘rational’ warmongers use a ‘double discourse’ based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations – they intend to go to war – just as they did against Iraq in 2003….

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Article by Kevin Carson.

Several weeks ago, Julian Sanchez announced his intent to leave the Cato Institute if the Koch brothers’ attempted takeover was successful. Corey Robin seized the opportunity to chide libertarians for our alleged inconsistency on the job culture (“When Libertarians Go to Work,” March 7).

Sanchez didn’t challenge the Kochs’ right to take over Cato if they could. He simply criticized a Koch takeover as undesirable. After such a takeover, he argued, he would likely face constraints on his autonomy and integrity from the new owners, with his freedom to seek out and speak the truth subordinated to their political agenda.

All well and good, says Robin. But why don’t libertarians like Sanchez follow such analysis to its logical conclusion? The Left has consistently criticized not only the culture of subordination in the workplace, but the economic power structures on which it depends.

Sanchez mentions lack of constraints from mortgage or family as a factor in his decision. Aha! says Robin — that’s just it! The vast majority of workers do experience such economic constraints, given the wealth and power differentials that the wage system depends on, and therefore don’t have the luxury of walking away from an authoritarian workplace. So Sanchez, typical libertarian that he is, ignores the ways in which the less privileged are subjected to coercive working conditions as a result of the economic structure.

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Article by Anthony Gregory.

Nineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic – any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.

Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not blessed by such freedom. In the founding generation, as half a million labored in slavery, many who fought in the Revolution genuinely believed in liberty, but for the ruling elite who chided them on, liberty was hardly more than a slogan. This has always been true of our political leaders. The Father of the Country was a centralizing slaveowner. Old Hickory talked up freedom as he threatened war on South Carolina and forced the Cherokee to flee from their ancestral land on a barbarously murderous walk of shame. The Great Emancipator turned America into a military dictatorship and abolished the revolutionary right of secession. Wilson’s New Freedom was cover for a Prussianized war machine generating revenue for his profiteering buddies on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms failed to include the freedom not to be drafted or interned in a concentration camp. Ronald Reagan threw the wordfreedom around as he trained Latin American torturers and raped the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting drugs. The United States has never lived up to its rhetoric.

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Listen to the interview.

Keith Preston interviews Russell Longcore. Topics include:

• How Russell’s political thinking shifted from the Republican Party to the Libertarians to anarchism.
• His experiences with the Republican Party of Cobb County, Georgia and his up-close observations of Newt Gingrich.
• The prospects and limitations of the Ron Paul campaign.
• Why he is now a non-voter who rejects electoral politics.
• The role of Thomas Paine and Lysander Spooner in the shaping of his political outlook.
• How he came to advocate secession as the solution to the American empire’s failure.
• How the BRIC axis is planning to challenge the dollar as the world reserve currency.
• The likelihood of hyperinflation and the collapse of the U.S. economy in the future.
• Why the breakup of the United States will more closely resemble the collapse of the Soviet empire rather than the colonial or Confederate secessions of 1776 and 1861.
• How the principal tasks of new secessionist communities will be the creation of a stable monetary system, the enactment of a viable political charter, and the formation of a defensive militia.
• His own conversion from evangelical Christianity to Deism.

Russell Longcore has an insurance claims practice in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He is the author of the book Insurance Claim Secrets Revealed.

Article by David D’Amato.

Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, once in headlines over a prostitution scandal, is in the news again. President Obama, Spitzer says, talks tough on Wall Street, yet shrinks from attempts at real reform. Spitzer adds that, with this president, “you have to distinguish between the rhetoric and the reality.”

Parsing the rhetorical guile of political Newspeak turns up helpful hints, especially when it comes to talk of reining in the likes of Bank of America and Citigroup. The truth is that the president is far from unique among the political class in his coziness with the banking elite. Historically, the largest and most influential banks have benefited enormously at the growth of the central state, including naturally the growth of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve System.

But there is an alternative to cursory talk of reform, one that actually would limit the dominion of plutocratic central decision-makers — both in business and in government — over the economic system, and in turn over our lives.

Stateless, free banking, the height of free association and voluntary trade, does not rely on the myth that the state and the economic ruling class are at odds. Rather free banking proceeds from and accepts, as economist Lawrence H. White writes, “the less question-begging assumption that government acts in its own pecuniary interest,” an interest that in practice has been closely aligned with that of a “central bank’s private constituency — presumably the large commercial banks.”

As usual, the effect of state intervention is not and never has been to place limitations on the growth and power of big business. It has instead been to structure, through a medley of entry barriers, an environment in which the economic ruling class is exempt from the hassles of legitimate competition.

All of the theoretical palavering, even where well-intentioned, regarding the best way to tinker with interest rates or the monetary base is completely empty, at least as an attempt at resolving the current state of affairs in finance. Even assuming that some single regulation — considered in the context of the existing oligopoly system — could indeed promote its purported goal of consumer protection, the overall product of the regulatory regime does not and cannot square with that goal.

And of course we couldn’t expect it to. Only free and open competition, with neither arbitrary constraints nor special privileges, can safeguard consumers against the abuses associated with monopoly. The common analytical mistake is to look upon the banking system of the present as relatively free from government interference, and to therefore impute its characteristic faults to laissez faire.

It shouldn’t be taken as coincidence, though, that the Wall Street giants and the Federal Reserve System are towering, dominant features in a banking system constantly lurching toward crisis. Market anarchists have long understood that the problems created by monetary centralization cannot be combated with yet more centralization.

Competition among banks as well as currencies would lead to stabilization of a type impossible for economies commanded by central banks (even assuming they had the necessary angelic motivations so often credited to them). Just the information necessary to arrive at, for instance, the ideal supply of circulating money at a given time is neither available to, nor susceptible to analysis by, a group of central bankers.

Only the unimpeded ebbs and flows of a genuine freed market, defined by billions of seemingly trivial consumer decisions, are competent to provide such coordination. Accordingly, the stability and efficiency functions of free banking harmonize seamlessly with its consumer protection functions.

It’s time to start treating the state and Wall Street like a single enemy. And in doing so, free banking is the natural solution.

C4SS News Analyst David S. D’Amato is a market anarchist and an attorney with an LL.M. in International Law and Business. His aversion to superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself atfirsttruths.org.

Article by William S. Lind.

Required reading.

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n 1914 the Houses of Hapsburg and Romanov sat transfixed, mesmerized by the central question: which would win this latest round in their old quarrel? But the paradigm had changed and both would lose, while the winners would be a distant American republic and a guy named Ulyanov sitting in a café in Zurich.

States, all states, now find themselves in a similar situation. The rise of Fourth Generation war, war waged outside the state framework, puts the state system itself in jeopardy. When one state fights another, the most likely outcome is that the loser disintegrates into another stateless region. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya offer painful examples.

But the governments of states don’t get it. They continue to act within the old paradigm of state vs. state even as doing so feeds the new post-state order. As Martin van Creveld—whose books The Transformation of War and The Rise and Decline of the State define the new paradigm—said to me, “Everyone can see it except the people in the capital cities.”

Exhibits A and B are two white papers issued by the U.S. government in January, “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense” and “Defense Budget Priorities and Choices.” The first, the strategic guidance paper, acknowledges the failure of George W. Bush’s revived Wilsonianism:

In the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States will emphasize non-military means … to address instability … U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.

Instead, we will prepare for war with China.

President Obama’s letter introducing the strategic guidance make it plain: “as we end today’s wars, we will focus on a broader range of challenges and opportunities, including the security and prosperity of the Asia Pacific.” The paper itself says:

We will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region … the growth of China’s military power must be accompanied by greater clarity of its strategic intentions in order to avoid causing friction in the region. The United States will continue to make the necessary investments to ensure that we maintain regional access and the ability to operate freely.

In a column in the New York Times, James Traub simplifies the message: “This is bureaucratic code for ‘we will stand up to China,’ which, the Obama administration has concluded, has superceded Al Qaeda as the chief future threat to American national security.”

In the February 13 Financial Times, Raoul Heinrichs, a scholar at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, wrote, “what the U.S. is saying is that it wants to deny China the ability to control even its own maritime approaches.”

The parallel with the Romanovs is uncanny. After Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905, St. Petersburg reoriented its expansionism toward the Balkans. We know how that ended.

The Pentagon needs an enemy to keep the money flowing, and after two failed land wars a confrontation with China promises a naval and air conflict. The “Defense Budget Priorities and Choices” paper states, “The focus on the Asia-Pacific region places a renewed emphasis on air and naval forces.” The thinking is that we can easily beat the Chinese in the skies and at sea.

That confidence may prove misplaced. At sea, China has an asymmetrical advantage if it goes nuclear. (After the Cold War, the U.S. Navy discovered that the Soviets had planned to go nuclear at sea at the outset of a superpower conflict, a nasty surprise.) If the Chinese nuke a carrier battle group, possibly with a ballistic missile attack, what do we do in response? China has no carrier task forces we can nuke. If we hit a naval base on the Chinese mainland, goodbye San Diego.

More fundamentally, what might happen if we won an air-sea war with China? A defeat would de-legitimize the none-too-stable government in Beijing. Upheaval within its borders could bring a breakup of the Chinese state and a new period of warring states; so China’s history suggests. No outcome could possibly be worse for American interests. The replacement of a unified China by a vast stateless region would be a victory beyond imagining for the Fourth Generation. The state would be shaken to its core.

Here we see the price of failing to grasp the coming paradigm and acting as if the old one were still in place. If the Washington Establishment had the slightest comprehension of grand strategy it would realize that the rise of Fourth Generation war demands an alliance of all states against non-state forces, just as in 1914 the rise of democracy and socialism demanded an alliance of all the European monarchies, especially the three strongest, Germany, Austria, and Russia. By fighting each other, they destroyed themselves. Today, when states fight other states the winners are non-state elements. As monarchy was at stake then, so the state system is at stake now. Everyone can see it, except the people in the capital cities.