Author Archives: Lila

Tom Englehardt on the Empire of Stupidity

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Tom Englehardt in Tomdispatch:

Forty years after Vietnam ended, the Bush administration made sure that Americans would have déjà vu all over again at least one last time. In the bargain, the president, vice president, and their top officials ensured that “the greatest force… the world has ever seen” would be a hurricane not of liberation but of destruction, the geopolitical equivalent of Katrina.

As it happened, 40 years later, the planet had changed. American military power not only would fail (as in Vietnam) to conquer all before it, but the United States would no longer prove to be the preeminent force on the planet, just the last, lingering superpower in a contest that had ended in 1991.

When, finally – 2010, 2012? – we do pack up, head home from the Iraqi dead zone, and try to forget, it surely won’t be as easy as it was 40-plus years ago (and, as the inability of our rulers to eradicate the “Vietnam syndrome” from their own brains indicates, it wasn’t so easy even then). Whether or not, as the president claims, the crop of “terrorists” he’s helped to grow will “follow us home,” something will certainly follow us home. After all, when the troops return, if they do, they will return to a “superpower” that, in population life expectancy, has plunged from 11th to 42nd place in only two decades, and, in infant mortality terms, now ranks well below many far poorer countries.

Of course, by then, the president, vice president, and those true believers still left in his administration will undoubtedly have entered the true American Green Zone, the one where a lecture to an audience of admirers can net you 75,000-100,000 greenbacks; where your story, no matter who writes it for you, will be worth millions; where your “library” can be a gathering place for “scholars”; and the “institute” you sponsor, a legacy recreating locus. It’s a zone in which the accountant, not accountability, rules.

In the meantime, we live with all the pointless verbiage, the “debate” in Washington, the “progress reports,” and the numerology of death, while the Bush administration hangs in there, determined to hand its war off to a new president, while the leading Democratic candidates essentially duck the withdrawal issue and the bodies pile ever higher.

It’s important to remember, however, that there was once quite another tradition in America. Whatever our country was in my 1950s childhood, Americans were still generally raised to believe that empire was a dreadful, un-American thing. We were, of course, already garrisoning the globe, but there was that other hideous empire, the Soviet one, to point to. Perhaps the urge for a republic, not an empire still lies hidden somewhere in the American psyche.

Let’s hope so, because one great task ahead for the American people will be to deconstruct whatever is left of our empire of stupidity and of this strange, militarized version of America we live in. We can dream, at least, that someday we’ll live in a world where one Defense Department is plenty, where militarized corporations don’t have endless battlefields on which to test their next techo-toys, where armies are for the defense of country, not to traipse the world in a state of eternal war, and victory is not vested in imperial conflict on the imagined frontiers of the planet, but in “progress reports” concerned with making life everywhere better, saner, and more peaceable.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

[Note: Two recent essays which explore allied topics to those considered in this post are well worth checking out: “Destruction: American Foreign Policy at Point Zero” by Gabriel Kolko in which the historian wonders “why the U.S. makes the identical mistakes over and over again and never learns from its errors”; and “The Waning Power of the War Myth” by Salon.com’s fine essayist Gary Kamiya on Bush’s absolute “addiction” to American triumphalism. “[Bush] will go down,” concludes Kamiya, “certain that he was right, living the Myth to the end. And because of his addiction to unreality, many more real people will die.”]

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

Ian Henshall on revisiting 9-11

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7 September 2007

911 The New Evidence

A new book challenges many of the myths which have grown up around the 911 attacks. 911 The New Evidence, out now in the UK (Constable) and soon in the US (pub Carol and Graf), makes the case for a new fully independent investigation into the 911 attacks. Henshall is available for interview.

Henshall's call is supported by a Zogby poll out today (ref see below): 51% of Americans support a new congressional enquiry into Bush and Cheney's role before during and after the 911 attacks, 30% support the immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney and 67% say the 911 Commission should have investigated the still unexplained collapse of Building 7 (which was announced to the media 30 minutes before it fell symmetrically to the ground at freefall speed). Previous polls have found that fewer than 20% of Americans believe they have been told the full story of the 911 attacks. Although some broadcasters have suggested otherwise, 911 victims groups are in the forefront of demands to reopen the enquiry. Many witnesses heard by the 911 Commission have denounced it as a whitewash, concuring with commissioner Max Cleland who resigned early on.

Ian Henshall, co-author with Rowland Morgan of the best seller 911 Revealed, described in the Sunday Times as exposing "vast gaps" in the official story. 911 Revealed became a non-fiction best seller. Henshall has now trailed through a wide range of Washington officials' memoirs, US government documents and mainstream press reports, concluding that the myths of the 911 attacks - the lack of warnings, the lucky 19 hijackers, the silent takeovers of the planes' cabins, the passengers' mobile phone calls - cannot be true.

Interviews and review copies

Henshall is available for interviews. He is in London on Monday 10 and Tuesday 11, but several slots are taken. To seek an interview on these days please email straight away and call 01273 326862 or 079469 39217.

For interviews on other dates and review copies of 911 The New Evidence please email the press contacts at the end of this message and copy a reply to this email.

Notes

In the run-up to the 911 anniversary Ian Henshall has been interviewed by a range of radio stations and the book has been featured in the Daily Express and the Sport with wider coverage pending in national and global media.

He has established that:

* The 2006 Moussaoui trial and Inspectors' reports have confirmed accusations from FBI officers in the field: in summer 2001 a network of senior CIA, Justice Department and FBI officials systematically obstructed the FBI field officers who suspected what was planned and could have foiled the attacks. The FBI was legally the lead agency. CIA officers at first falsely testified that they had informed the FBI of the threat posed by presumed hijackers Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar and later told inspectors they "could not recall" why they did not.

* The "anti-hijack exercise" scheduled by the Pentagon at the time the "real" attack took place seems more than an extraordinary coincidence and a close reading of partially released air traffic control transcripts indicates that the exercise may have involved at least one of the planes used in the attacks.

* If video and flight recorder evidence released by the US government is correct, Flight 77 could not have hit the Pentagon. The government admitted at the Moussaoui trial that contrary to the official myth, reflected in a series of feature films and tv documentaries, only two mobile phone calls were made from Flight 93. One reported smoke and an explosion shortly prior to the crash.

* Condoleeza Rice falsely stated on oath to the 911 Commission that Bush's August 2001 CIA briefing, which warned him of the possibility of an attack within America and was still secret at the time she testified, did not mention any specific targets. In fact it mentioned New York and predicted a possible hostage taking. Intriguingly, the presumed hijackers apparently told passengers on two planes that this was their plan.

* The "Independent 911 Commission" misrepresented evidence from Pentagon officials, made false statements and failed to ask the right questions. The Commissioners, far from being independent, were trusted members of Washington's permanent government. Commissioner Hamilton the leading Democrat was a political ally of Cheney from when they worked together on the Iran-contra scandal in the late 1980's. Commissioner Cleland resigned in disgust.

* Early official reports into the collapse of the Twin Towers present clear evidence - vaporised and sulpfurised steel, seismic events preceding the plane impacts - suggesting that, as eyewitnesses reported at the time, the neat symmetrical collapse of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at near freefall speed was the result of explosions in the buildings.

* Ex UK foreign minister Robin Cook wrote in The Guardian that the original meaning of Al Qaeda was "the database", ie the list of Afghan arab freedom fighters closely linked to if not controlled by the CIA. Recent statements from officials, along with press reports at the time, make it clear that Al Qaeda had links with the CIA or the DIA well into the 1990's. Osama Bin laden's move from Sudan to Afghanistan was managed by Ali Mohamed, Washington's spy at the heart of Al Qaeda who trained Osama Bin laden's personal bodyguards. Alleged 911 ringleader Khaled Sheikh Mohammed lived in Pakistan for years while secretly indicted by the US Justice Department. He was probably an asset of Pakistan's ISI. US government documents show the ISI was working closely with George Tenet and the CIA on a secret project in the months before 911. Its boss General Ahmad was in secret Washington meetings with top officials and congressmen before during and after the 911 attacks. Reports from India, supported by the French media said that the terrorist money trail went back to Ahmad, who took early retirement shortly after the news came out. The claim by Washington journalist Gerald Posner that the ISI was colluding with Al Qaeda against the wishes of the CIA seems an unlikely explanation.

8. A close examination of the paper trail from 2000 and 2001 shows beyond doubt that the decision (and probably detailed planning) to invade Iraq was taken before, not after, the 911 attacks and CIA boss Tenet was involved in the plans. The record shows an unusual series of long meetings (denied by Tenet in evidence he gave on oath to the 911 Commission) with Bush in Texas in the weeks up to 911. One such meeting, still unacknowledged in Tenet's recent memoirs, lasted for a full day and included the chiefs of staff whose planes apparently failed to intercept any of four hijacked planes. The official account has left an unexplained and undocumented black hole of 20 minutes at the Pentagon situation room at the height of the crisis.

9. Cheney who championed plans to invade Iraq before 911 was in charge of the Pentagon on the morning of 9/11 and almost certainly in charge of the hijack exercise.

10. BBC News was recently embarrassed by video surfacing on the internet which showed an announcer stating the the "Saloman Brothers Building" (WTC7) had collapsed while in the background it still stood intact. WTC7 housed the largest Secret Servcice office in the US and was the repository of high level fraud investigations. Many of these records were lost in the collapse.

Henshall draws no firm conclusions but ends with a working hypothesis for investigators to follow up.

"9/11 THE NEW EVIDENCE"
pub Sept 2007 Constable (UK) ISBN 978-1-84529-514-1
http://www.amazon.co.uk/11-New-Evidence-Ian-Henshall/dp/1845295145/
publicity: "Sam Evans" <Sam@constablerobinson.com>

Police State Chronicles: Fed judge unravels Patriot act

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NEW YORK – A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court’s approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act “offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.”

More at AP.

Mobs in the Market: the crisis is unfolding…..

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The sub-prime debacle rolls on:

“American Home Mortgage joins more than 50 lenders in bankruptcy this year.”
~MSNBC – Aug 6, 2007
~Bloomberg, Aug 10, 2007

“Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s $8 billion Global Alpha hedge fund has fallen 26 percent so far this year…”

Check out this piece I wrote in Money Week about Goldman Sachs
I kind of jumped the gun on it, but the fact is the big bank is in trouble over the credit crunch, something few people would have once thought possible.

Hedge funds are keeling over all over the place as well:

“Hedge fund operator Sowood Capital Management said Friday it would return $1.4 billion to investors after losing an estimated 60% of their money last month…”
~LA Times, Aug 4, 2007

Hedge funds are taking a hit for 60% in a month.

Home mortgage lenders are going belly up, 50 this year alone.

Meanwhile, the “plunge protection team” at the Federal reserve is on the job with soothing words:

On March 28th, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress he believed that sub-prime defaults were “likely to be contained.”

On June 20th, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsonsaid the fallout “will not affect the economy overall.”

On June 27th, Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal claimed the defaults were “reasonably well contained.”

    In August, $40 billion in credit had been pumped into the financial system over two days – more than anything the Fed has done since 9/11.

    But can the economy stay on keel?

    Today, Sept. 6, there are announcements of terrorist warnings as dire as any since September 11…

    Are we near a crisis?

    Who knows? The point is when you have a situation this large and this complex, all bets are off.

    Glen Greenwald on why criticizing Tom Friedman is justified….

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    In response to the gentle souls who think harsh criticism of Thomas Friedman is “mean,” here is Glen Greenwald, author of the NY Times best seller, How Would a Patriot Act? on what it is that makes the columnist a richly deserving target. in his public persona, of course. We have nothing against Friedman personally, needless to say. He may be the nicest of human beings in private life – but his public views are as lethal as any weapon of mass destruction. They need to be defused….

    The Tom Friedman disease consumes Establishment Washington

    (Friday, Dec. 1, 2006 – later updated

    Someone e-mailed me several days ago to say that while it is fruitful and necessary to chronicle the dishonest historical record of pundits and political figures when it comes to Iraq, I deserve to be chastised for failing to devote enough attention to the person who, by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal “hawks” and thereby creating “consensus” support for Bush’s war — Tom Friedman, from his New York Times perch as “the nation’s preeminent centrist foreign policy genius.”

    That criticism immediately struck me as valid, and so I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary. Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country. Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite — amazingly enough, I think it’s more accurate to say “because of” — his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America’s history.

    This matters so much not simply in order to expose Friedman’s intellectual and moral emptiness, though that is a goal worthy and important in its own right. Way beyond that, the specific strain of intellectual bankruptcy that drove Friedman’s strident support for the invasion of Iraq continues to be what drives not only Tom Friedman today, but virtually all of our elite opinion-makers and “centrist” and “responsible” political figures currently attempting to “solve” the Iraq disaster.

    In column after column prior to the war, Friedman argued that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a noble, moral, and wise course of action. To Friedman, that was something we absolutely ought to do, and as a result, he repeatedly used his column to justify the invasion and railed against anti-war arguments voiced by those whom he derisively called “knee-jerk liberals and pacifists” (so as not to clutter this post with long Friedman quotes, I’m posting the relevant Friedman excerpts here).

    But at the same time Friedman was cheering on the invasion, he was inserting one alarmist caveat after the next about how dangerous a course this might be and about all the problems that might be unleashed by it. He thus repeatedly emphasized the need to wage the War what he called “the right way.” To Friedman, the “right way” meant enlisting support from allies across Europe and the Middle East for both the war and the subsequent re-building, telling Americans the real reasons for the war, and ensuring that Americans understood what a vast and long-term commitment we were undertaking as a result of the need to re-build that country.

    Only if the Bush administration did those things, argued Friedman, would this war achieve good results. If it did not do those things, he repeatedly warned, this war would be an unparalleled disaster.

    Needless to say, the Bush administration did none of the things Friedman insisted were prerequisites for invading Iraq “the right way.” And Friedman recognized that fact, and repeatedly pointed it out. Over and over, in the months before the war, Friedman would praise the idea of the war and actively push for the invasion, but then insert into his columns statements like this:

    And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won’t be able to do it right.

    But: Despite the Bush administration’s failures to take any of the steps necessary to wage the war “the right way,” Friedman never once rescinded or even diluted his support for the war. He continued to advocate the invasion and support the administration’s push for war — at one point, in February, even calling for the anti-war French to be removed from the U.N. Security Council and replaced by India, and at another point warning that we must be wary of Saddam’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate an alternative to war lest we be tricked into not invading — even though Friedman knew and said that all the things that needed to be done to avert disaster were not being done by the administration.

    Put another way, these are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:

    (1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
    (2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
    (3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
    (4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

    Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the “wrong way” and would thus — also by his own reasoning — create nothing but untold damage on every level. And he did so all because there was some imaginary, hypothetical, fantasy way of doing the war that Friedman thought was good, but that he knew isn’t what we would get.

    To support a war that you know is going to be executed in a destructive manner is as morally monstrous as it gets.. ……”

    An ex-marine on politics and Ron Paul…

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    I am a republican and I have been for a bunch of years now. I voted for Harry Browne in 2000, I was a big Alan Keyes supporter and I couldn’t vote for GWB. In 2004, I supported the war in Iraq and I voted for President Bush because of that and the tax cuts.
    I had a real eye opener when I heard about Ron Paul’s candidacy on C-Span and when I heard him in the debates. I believed Rush and Sean when they said that the liberals wanted to, “cut and run”. I still do think that much of the opposition to the war from the liberal side is aimed at the President and that a democratic President, (Clinton, Obama, Edwards etc…) would not leave Iraq. When we went to war I believed it would be a cakewalk it was predicted to be. Up until this year I believed, “stay the course” was our only option. The people who predicted easy victory now said that if we left it would be genocide and a vacuum would soon fill with Al Queda.
    I decided it was high time to stop believing the people who were wrong and start believing the man who was right from the beginning, Ron Paul. What Dr. Paul has been saying since well before 9/11/2001 is that wars ought to be declared, per the constitution. The track record of our declared wars versus our undeclared wars tells the sad tale. Dr. Paul believes, and I agree, that looking for the motive for a crime is not blaming the victim but an attempt to prevent future crimes. We should remember that we once supported both Bin Laden and Saddam and we should wonder who we are supporting now that we will fight later.
    While we are off nation building and intervening in the internal affairs of “certain” other nations, we should be careful to preserve our freedoms at home. What are we fighting for in Iraq if we still lose liberties at home? Ah, safety, that’s it… But is it so important to be safe? The info about the attacks of 9/11 was in our hands. The bureaucracy was too large to allow the info to get to the correct hands. What solution did we offer to make sure this wouldn’t happen again? We added a monster bureaucracy on top of the existing one in an effort to “streamline” information.
    The real threat to our freedom is the idea that we should give up freedom and rights at home in order to keep us safe. By accepting this premise we forget the reasons this nation was founded. We are under a more oppressive tax system than the one that led to the Boston Tea Party. We can’t reduce these taxes without changing our welfare/warfare government policies. If the second amendment was fully honored we could have prevented the attacks of 9/11 and the VTech massacre.
    “Give me liberty or give me death” has been replaced by “Take our liberty and keep us safe”. This is not American. We are throwing our rights to the government like a wallet to a mugger. The terrorists can only kill us, the government can do far worse. The Army, Navy, Air force and my fellow Marines are bravely risking their lives for our country. Let us, safe at home, have the courage to take a little less security at home and attempt to restore the republic.

    From the Moderately Interesting Unoriginal Blog.

    The economic handwriting is on the wall….

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    August 31, 2007

    This week, Larry Kudlow and others strongly chastised Bernanke for his failure to read the writing on the wall and urged the Fed Chairman to quickly slash the Fed Funds rate. Methinks the pundits doth protest too much. For years, Kudlow, who practically coined the term “Goldilocks economy,” has dismissed with scorn suggestions that the American economy was anything less than ragingly healthy. If our economy is really so strong, why does he call so loudly for the artificial stimulus of a significant rate cut?

    In truth, the writing has been clearly on the wall all along. A credit bubble has been steadily inflating for at least the last six years, which in its final frenzy produced some of the most absurd mortgage funding products the world has ever seen. To anyone not dependent on the hysteria, a no-doc, no money down, negative amortization, interest only, adjustable rate jumbo mortgage was just as clear a sign of pending catastrophe as was $200 for a share of Pets.com, or 5,000 Dutch guilders for a single tulip bulb.

    The one thing all bubbles have in common is that they eventually pop, and ours just did. Unlike the popping of the last bubble in 2000-2001, this one will fall directly to our economy’s bottom line. And this time the Fed can not step up to the plate with unlimited liquidity injections.

    A record percentage of our GDP is comprised of consumer spending. The source of this spending was the housing bubble. Would our savings rate really be negative were it not for housing related “wealth?” Could consumers really have spent as much as they did without the benefits of temporarily low teaser rates and the ability to extract equity from their homes? How many service sector jobs are directly related to that extra spending? When the low mortgage payments and home equity disappear, so too will the spending and jobs they engendered.

    Those who feel that the economy will keep growing must believe that discretionary consumer spending is unrelated to wealth or expenses. In other words, they believe that individuals will spend as much with no home equity and $3,000 per month mortgage payments as they did with $200,000 in home equity $1,500 monthly payments. Factor in other rising expenses; such as food, energy, insurance, and taxes and discretionary spending will not just slow, it will completely collapse.

    With the ugly truth laid bare, many now prod Bernanke and Bush for solutions. Unfortunately there are none. Based on absurd assumptions about real estate, we simply borrowed more money than we can ever hope to pay back. There is no magic elixir we can swallow to cure what ails us. The free market is the only force that can fix this mess. Unfortunately, the fix won’t be pretty. Prudent lending standards will return, guaranteeing that real estate prices collapse. This is an important connection that very few have made. There is no way the average American can afford to buy the average house at today’s prices with a mortgage he can afford. Assuming that the lax standards of 2005-2006 do not return, the only way this can happen is if real estate prices collapse, which is exactly what is happening.

    The financial institutions that are calling most loudly for a bailout claim the Government must act to protect homeowners. However, the most severe losses will not be born by homeowners but by those who loaned them the money. Therefore any bailouts will ultimately go to lenders not borrowers. Homeowners who offered no down payment and who have no equity in their homes will in reality lose nothing in foreclosure, except perhaps a debt burden on an overpriced house. In addition, even those homeowners who made down payments likely extracted larger sums in subsequent refinancings or home equity loans. With plenty of available foreclosed homes on the market to rent it is unlikely that these former homeowners will become homeless……”

    Mobs: Were we too mean?

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    This post is not, I hope, an example of the “three parts of ego” that one reader finds in “Mobs,” though he grudgingly admits it was a “great read,” which missed being even better because of the heaping scorn it poured on a variety of people and things.

    I wonder about that.

    Bill and I had many discussions about the levels of snarkiness the many-headed would take before throwing some of it right back in our face.

    We were warned it would offend reviewers. It might. We took out a lot of things. And we put back some. We thought about softening a lot of it. I tried numskulls and nitwits, instead of idiots — just to be nice and all…..

    But the herd we are talking about…..is not something outside any of us. That’s the point of the book.

    Some people seem to have missed that. The mob isn’t really “out there” — it’s something we all struggle against within ourselves. The urge to conform, to follow, to do as others do, to obey senseless orders, turn on the outsider, commit judicial murder.

    The heroes of our book are the individuals who don’t turn their back on the defenseless and the voiceless. But we aren’t about to confuse that kind of goodness with the professions of corporate journalists, public policy wonks, and verbose politicians.
    So let me say this. Except for some modest Bush-bashing ,and of course, the mandatory Thomas Friedman festivity (this is a cottage industry not only down at the Daily Reckoning but on some academic and left-wing sites), I really don’t know who or what it was that we ridiculed  that was so sacrosanct….or didn’t deserve it.

    It’s apparently OK to commit mass killings, despoil countries, lie, cheat and swindle, but mentioning that fact bluntly is altogether just too, too terrible. Next, I am going to hear — mean-spirited!

    Our critic doesn’t seem to have figured out how hopeful the book is. It has nothing offensive whatsoever to say about those who really do good — the Sophie Scholls and Dr. V’s of the world. Its venom is directed at the great ones who so richly deserve it, but are protected by our platitudinous culture from public scorn.

    As for James Surowiecki – we criticize him a bit, but only tangentially. Proving a thesis is not what this book is about. It’s exactly what it’s not about.

    “Mobs” is not a pop sociology tract. It’s simply our report on the state of affairs in what we call the public spectacle. Wars, manias, swindles — don’t any of these call for some excoriation?

    They do.
    No apologies.

    Ron Paul and the Empire of Experts

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    Lila Rajiva (co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” on being Married to the Mob on The Michael Dresser Show tonight, September 5 at 6:00 p.m. EST)

    What is it about Ron Paul that attracts as many and as diverse a group of people as are repelled by him?

    For a number of people, right and left, it is his consistent opposition
    to the Iraq war.

    It is a good reason. Moral courage allied with wisdom is as much in short supply these days as chastity at a political convention.

    For others, it is Paul’s fiscal responsibility.

    Dr. No has been pursing his lips at every form of political candy offered by the junk food vendors at the Capital. While many of his colleagues are letting out their belts, the wiry obstetrician is running marathons at 71.

    While they keep getting caught in what used to be called “indiscretions,” he has been married for fifty years. We would be foolish to judge people by the externals of their lives, for saints and sinners, puritans and bohemians not only cohabit, they frequently snuggle under the same skin. Nonetheless, it’s a relief to have a few people around in politics to remind us that it’s also perfectly all right to live uneventfully, even stodgily.

    I say this as someone who has spent a large part of her life among musicians, writers, and now, financial newsletter writers – whose professional lives depend on their eccentricity and even contrariness.

    There is however one critical difference between selling financial advice and intellectual nostrums on the one hand and delivering babies on the other – which is what Dr. Paul has done for most of his professional life. The success of obstetrics is pretty easy to verify. Either the child breathes and lives – or it doesn’t.

    One can’t be a good obstetrician on theory alone. The practice is all.
    Check the track record of the average stock tout and you might find nothing but bankruptcy filings and credit card debt. That, of course, will count for little with the tout’s avid customers who would mortgage their four walls and roof for his advice. And toss in their wives as a bonus.

    As for the pedant, you wish he’d trip over one of his obtuse, meandering sentences and break his scrawny neck before he stuck it into the real world. But does anyone care? No. His pet theories may have driven the nation into premature recession if not down-right impotence, but the expert will be given not only an institute of his very own at some Ivy League, but the whole Earth along with it……. to run as he wishes.

    There, winsome coeds will no doubt ornament every step of his way to a Nobel Prize.

    Theory is easy. Any biped with a larynx and functioning synapses can come up with one.
    It is practice that separates the goats from the sheep.

    And that is the principal reason that the pundits are afraid of that revolution of the people that is the rise of Ron Paul.

    Ron Paul wants to put the practice of citizenry back in the hands of citizens and take it away from the theorists.

    Oh, the critics will tell you differently. They will tell you that Ron Paul is a theorist himself – and a crack-pot theorist as well. A patron of fringe economics. A gentlemanly loon. Or at least, dangerously far out on the right bank of the mainstream.

    Since the mainstream has just finished wrecking a whole country abroad in a manner that Genghis Khan would have been proud of and is busy adding yet another to its sights; and since, in the meantime it’s also managed to find the time to dismantle several centuries worth of legal structure at home, you wonder why anyone would worry about that, anyway.

    But there you have the sad truth about man. He isn’t much concerned about anything besides how other people think of him. That’s all he thinks about all day long. For that he sweats and schleps, roils and toils.

    Status. Image. In groups. Out groups. Pariahs. Brahmins. The sum total of it all is — what does the other fellow think of me?

    Right or wrong counts for far less. His conscience or soul — for nothing at all. If he feels a pang, he swigs gelusil and turns on the hypnotic lights of his TV set.

    And why? Because with no real, concrete practical knowledge anywhere between his ears, his skull rings with the lethal chatter of newspaper headlines and talk shows.

    The patter of Those Who Know Better.

    Hedge-fund managers who promise that all risk can be ironed out of your portfolio and make you pay for the wrinkles that aren’t.

    Political scientists who invade a country from their desktops, but don’t know how to boot it up again when it crashes.

    Hucksters who dream up great stories for their products — and make a punch-line out of the patsies who buy them.

    We live in an empire run by experts.
    But in the empire of experts, the man with horse sense is king.

    And Ron Paul has horse sense.

    The horse sense of mustangs, not geldings.

    The kind of horse sense that bucks and sends you for a toss just when you thought you had everything under control. The horse sense that stops you from thinking about things so far off you couldn’t possibly have spotted them — while tripping over things so close by you shouldn’t ever have missed them.

    The experts would have you believe that they can control your life and the life of entire nations by thinking long enough and hard enough about it. This is a theory so full of holes it puts Swiss cheese to shame.

    Studies have even shown (Philip Tetlock, “Expert Political Judgment – How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”) that canny laymen do as well as experts when it come to predicting the future. In fact, many do even better.

    But it’s the experts who have broken us in.
    The reason is simple. Experts promise us a simple, sharp tool to dissect the complexity of the real world.

    But a dissection that thorough can only be a post-mortem. Cut through the warm body of society that fiercely and you turn it into a cadaver.

    Gray is all theory, says Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust. The golden tree of life is green.

    Here, we will improve on the devil. Between book covers, theory may be gray – but it is an intricate gossamer of gray – like the tracery in a Gothic cathedral or the mysterious depths of an engraving by Gustave Dore


    I have no quarrel with theory. In fact, I have a weakness for it, as I have for all rich, superfluous things.

    But a map is not a road, and a silhouette is not a human being. The trouble begins when experts begin to take their expertise so seriously that they forfeit their own road sense and their readers’. When they are so neutered by their reasoning that they cannot act – or worse yet, cannot stop acting. And the trouble grows into disaster when their credulous followers, junkies of every news and TV show, rush behind them like rats behind the Hamelin piper — into every frippery and fad, every financial folly and military madness.

    And that is what we have today in our empire of experts. Worse than any war – which must at some point end — is the ideology that makes for war.

    That tells us that “what is” is also “what must be.” You see, empires are made for experts as experts are made for empires. Without their theories to hold it up, the flimsy scaffold of government would fall of its own feebleness. And without that scaffold, the little men on top would be cut down to the same size as the rest of us.
    And that, my friends, is the real reason why the experts fear Dr. Paul and the people love him.

    Update:

    This article was one of the top 10 articles on LRC. First time I made it. They all look like good pieces too.

    1. The Government-Created Subprime Mortgage Meltdown by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
    2. The Ultimate ‘Success Through Failure’ Manual by Gary North
    3. Phase III of Bush’s War by Patrick J. Buchanan
    4. Ron Paul and the Four Horsemen by James Ostrowski
    5. ‘They’ Hate Our Freedoms by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
    6. What Is Wikipedia, and What Is It Good For? by Dick Clark
    7. A Busy Week for the Front-Runner, Ron Paul by Rick Fisk
    8. The George W. Bush Freedom Institute by Karen Kwiatkowski
    9. Ron Paul and the Empire of Experts by Lila Rajiva
    10. Ron Paul’s Inaugural Address by Johnny Kramer

    Mobs, Messiahs, and Cauliflower…..

    Posted on by

    CLEVER CAULIFLOWER – LILA RAJIVA &BILL BONNER

    (from my book with Bill Bonner, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets – technically the copyright is held by both of us, but since his crew promotes the entire book as his, I decided to start putting my own stuff (stuff I wrote entirely) on the net as mine. It’s actually already been published in my name before the book came out in a slightly different form. But what’s sauce for the gander…is sauce for this goose [Since then, they have added the credits so since the message got through, I have added back Bill’s name here as you can see: (the original post had both names – the change was simply to send a message….):

    “What most men don’t understand is that most of our beliefs about the economy – and everything else – are forms of self-medication — “Stocks for the long run,” “Globalization is good,” “Dow 36,000.” We repeat slogans to ourselves because everyone else does. Man is first of all a herd animal and fears nothing more than not being part of the herd.

    In fact, the reason lies even deeper, in the deceptive nature of thought itself, even for instance, in the way we think about risk. Our thinking seems to be skewed only to certain sorts of risk – where what ends up happening depends only on a few stable factors. But often the abnormal event is the one that happens so rarely that it isn’t even reckoned with most of the time.

    What we are talking about here is fat tails AN OUTLIIER – AN EVENT that lieS so far outside the normal course of events THINGS that we tend to push them equally far away in our consciousness, events that are so devastating that when they do occur, they cancel out every other consideration. There may be only a very slim chance that the human race will be wiped off the face of the earth, it is true. But it would probably pay us to take that slim chance very seriously.

    And here we run into the problem with slogans about something like global trade in genetically modified food, for example. Just because a fat-tail disaster might smack us in the face at any moment, does that mean we are in favor of more, say, government regulations on food production?

    Here, we are forced to hem and haw. Government regulation tends to be ineffective, in many cases. And since regulators are frequently drawn from the same industries they are supposed to be regulating, we think they tend to be counterproductive in all the others.

    So, we are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it. We are merely grumbling in our curmudgeonly way that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours. We like our food au naturel, unrefurbished, unhedged, and in default drive. Unless it is communion wine, any transformations of nature need to pass the smell test first. We need to be protected from them, as surely as we need to be protected from bad checks, assault, murder, and another Michael Jackson trial.

    You see our problem, dear reader? We would like the state to stop telling us what to do-whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms — but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water, our potatoes, or our boeuf bourguignon at the expense of our local culture and with subsidies from our tax dollars.

    This is unlikely to win us any popularity contests today when there are only two acceptable positions on globalization: It is A Very Good Thing. Or, it is A Very Bad Thing. But slogans don’t always do the trick. Each problem has to be thought through in its own terms. Not only is globalization neither entirely good nor entirely bad, it is not even one single thing. It is several. It is about free trade and costly subsidies, about gourmet water and junk food, about hard capital and soft drinks — all of which have their own reasons for being and their own consequences, and all of which are mislabeled, poorly understood, and constantly confused. In fact, the only thing you can be sure of about globalization is that it provokes extremes of two emotions in the mob — greed and fear. In other words, the only thing that is certain about it is that it is a public spectacle.

    Naturally, like all public spectacles, globalization is wrapped up in a huge amount of cant. For instance, if you are a poor country, you are supposed to take to the thing as eagerly as a diabetic to insulin.

    Now, if it was just a matter of freeing up trade between countries, we would nod our heads in agreement. The exchange of goods and services between people is, and always has been, a good thing. It is, so far as we can see, a far better way of getting what you want than hitting your fellow man over the head. But for it to really work, trade – like driving – needs a set of rules everyone follows; otherwise you are liable to crash or be run over.

    And this is where it gets complicated. Because it turns out that many of the rules of global trade are set by the very people who are weighing down the market with all sorts of subsidies, sweetheart deals, perks, pork, and privileges, in the first place.

    Take the World Bank, which is in the business of telling countries what they need to do to play the global trade game. In the lumpen imagination, the World Bank is not too different from the local neighborhood savings and loan – a kind of multicultural version of the friendly bank in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But the real World Bank is headed up not by Jimmy Stewart, but by people like Paul Wolfowitz, a man whom his best friend wouldn’t call a soft touch. Confirmed as the bank’s boss in 2005, Wolfowitz immediately proclaimed he was on a mission of mercy:

    “Helping the poorest of the world to lift themselves out of poverty is a noble mission or, as former Secretary of State George Shultz said, ‘a beautiful mission.’ ”

    But, the Sisters of Charity do not have to worry about the competition. Wolfowitz has been one of Washington’s biggest hawks, ever since the days when he argued for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. To this day, he likes to praise Indonesia’s Suharto, who in his 32-year reign looted $30 billion from the public treasury and turned his country into one of the most corrupt in the world.

    Of course, on second thought, that might be the perfect resume for the World Bank…..

    *********
    Lila Rajiva is the co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”
    (Wiley, August 31, 2007) and the author of the ground-breaking study, “Abu Ghraib and the American Media,” (December, 2005). She blogs at The Mind-Body Politic. She can be reached at lrajiva@hotmail.com.

    and is that most of our beliefs about the economy – and everything else – are forms of self-medication — “Stocks for the long run,” “Globalization is good,” “Dow 36,000.” We repeat slogans to ourselves because everyone else does. Man is first of all a herd animal and fears nothing more than not being part of the herd.

    In fact, the reason lies even deeper, in the deceptive nature of thought itself, even for instance, in the way we think about risk. Our thinking seems to be skewed only to certain sorts of risk – where what ends up happening depends only on a few stable factors. But often the abnormal event is the one that happens so rarely that it isn’t even reckoned with most of the time.

    What we are talking about here is fat tails AN OUTLIIER – AN EVENT that lieS so far outside the normal course of events THINGS that we tend to push them equally far away in our consciousness, events that are so devastating that when they do occur, they cancel out every other consideration. There may be only a very slim chance that the human race will be wiped off the face of the earth, it is true. But it would probably pay us to take that slim chance very seriously.

    And here we run into the problem with slogans about something like global trade in genetically modified food, for example. Just because a fat-tail disaster might smack us in the face at any moment, does that mean we are in favor of more, say, government regulations on food production?

    Here, we are forced to hem and haw. Government regulation tends to be ineffective, in many cases. And since regulators are frequently drawn from the same industries they are supposed to be regulating, we think they tend to be counterproductive in all the others.

    So, we are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it. We are merely grumbling in our curmudgeonly way that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours. We like our food au naturel, unrefurbished, unhedged, and in default drive. Unless it is communion wine, any transformations of nature need to pass the smell test first. We need to be protected from them, as surely as we need to be protected from bad checks, assault, murder, and another Michael Jackson trial.

    You see our problem, dear reader? We would like the state to stop telling us what to do-whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms — but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water, our potatoes, or our boeuf bourguignon at the expense of our local culture and with subsidies from our tax dollars.

    This is unlikely to win us any popularity contests today when there are only two acceptable positions on globalization: It is A Very Good Thing. Or, it is A Very Bad Thing. But slogans don’t always do the trick. Each problem has to be thought through in its own terms. Not only is globalization neither entirely good nor entirely bad, it is not even one single thing. It is several. It is about free trade and costly subsidies, about gourmet water and junk food, about hard capital and soft drinks — all of which have their own reasons for being and their own consequences, and all of which are mislabeled, poorly understood, and constantly confused. In fact, the only thing you can be sure of about globalization is that it provokes extremes of two emotions in the mob — greed and fear. In other words, the only thing that is certain about it is that it is a public spectacle.

    Naturally, like all public spectacles, globalization is wrapped up in a huge amount of cant. For instance, if you are a poor country, you are supposed to take to the thing as eagerly as a diabetic to insulin.

    Now, if it was just a matter of freeing up trade between countries, we would nod our heads in agreement. The exchange of goods and services between people is, and always has been, a good thing. It is, so far as we can see, a far better way of getting what you want than hitting your fellow man over the head. But for it to really work, trade – like driving – needs a set of rules everyone follows; otherwise you are liable to crash or be run over.

    And this is where it gets complicated. Because it turns out that many of the rules of global trade are set by the very people who are weighing down the market with all sorts of subsidies, sweetheart deals, perks, pork, and privileges, in the first place.

    Take the World Bank, which is in the business of telling countries what they need to do to play the global trade game. In the lumpen imagination, the World Bank is not too different from the local neighborhood savings and loan – a kind of multicultural version of the friendly bank in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But the real World Bank is headed up not by Jimmy Stewart, but by people like Paul Wolfowitz, a man whom his best friend wouldn’t call a soft touch. Confirmed as the bank’s boss in 2005, Wolfowitz immediately proclaimed he was on a mission of mercy:

    “Helping the poorest of the world to lift themselves out of poverty is a noble mission or, as former Secretary of State George Shultz said, ‘a beautiful mission.’ ”

    But, the Sisters of Charity do not have to worry about the competition. Wolfowitz has been one of Washington’s biggest hawks, ever since the days when he argued for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. To this day, he likes to praise Indonesia’s Suharto, who in his 32-year reign looted $30 billion from the public treasury and turned his country into one of the most corrupt in the world.

    Of course, on second thought, that might be the perfect resume for the World Bank…..

    *********
    Lila Rajiva is the co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”
    (Wiley, August 31, 2007) and the author of the ground-breaking study, “Abu Ghraib and the American Media,” (December, 2005). She blogs at The Mind-Body Politic. She can be reached at lrajiva@hotmail.com.