The New American Empire: READ
THE BOOK!
Shop at Amazon.com!
Click
to order the book from Amazon.com
***** To
order
The Code for Global Ethics,
by
Rodrigue Tremblay,
click:
The
Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles
|
SLOVENIAN POLISH SERBIAN TURKISH ***Lisez
des extraits du livre du Professeur Tremblay: Le Code pour une éthique globale Janvier
2009 ISBN:
978-2-89578-173-8 ***Read excerpts from Dr. TREMBLAY's new book: The Code for Global
Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles Prometheus Books April 2010 Friday, June 14, 2013 The Real Obama's Bent on Killing Innocent People with
Remote-controlled Drones by Rodrigue Tremblay (Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”,
and “The New
American Empire”) “You can't say civilization
don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.” Will
Rogers
(1879-1935) American
cowboy, vaudeville performer, humorist, social commentator and motion picture
actor [Afghan
parents] “have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of
civilian casualties caused by American military operations.” Gen. Davis H. Petraeus, top
U.S. commander in Afghanistan, February 20, 2011, (report of a meeting at
President Hamid Karzai's presidential palace) “If people can’t trust not
only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and
don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by
the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to
have some problems here.“ Pres.
Barack Obama, speech
in San Jose, Ca, (June 7, 2013) “Nearly all men can stand
adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln
(1809—1865) 16th
President of the United States (1861-65) When Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney
in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, there was hope that the newly
reelected president would show his true colors during his second term, not
having to run again and having nothing to lose by being himself. I, for one,
hoped that the Real
Obama, the 2008
Obama of “Yes we Can”, would liberate himself from the
Washington-centered military-industrial
complex and show
some character and principles, and reverse some of the most dangerous
policies that the Bush-Cheney administration had set in motion. Also, there
was hope that Barack Obama, as American President, would establish some
distance between his administration and Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu who had
openly campaigned for Mitt Romney and against him during the election, a fact
that earned Netanyahu the title of “Republican representative from the
state of Israel.” Granted that
President Obama, on paper at least, is much less a loose cannon than would
have been a John McCain or a Mitt Romney in the presidency, both of whom
sometimes gave the impression of being little more than neocon puppets. But
expectations were that Barack Obama would be much more than a slightly
improved version of his radical opponents of 2008 and 2012. Instead, evidence
indicates that Barack Obama went the other way and is actively competing with
Richard
Nixon and George
W. Bush to become a secretive and warmongering president. It would seem
that Barack Obama has gone native,
i.e. he has embraced
the Washington nomenklatura's agenda with enthusiasm in restraining civil
liberties and in promoting global
warfare in the
quest of an Imperial
America. In
particular, he has increased the killing of innocent people, often innocent children, around the world with the crude
instruments of state terror and killing machines called military unmanned
“drones”. Keep in mind
that such instruments of terror were invented in the 1980s by an Israeli
national, Abraham
Karem, then chief
designer for the Israeli airforce, and who migrated to California to pursue
his activities. Initially used for surveillance only, advances in information
and computer technology have made possible the building of military killing
drones, to the delight of the companies that build them – mainly
American and Israeli – which have raked in gorgeous profits for their
contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon. Indeed, the
sophisticated remote control technology, using satellite communications for
targeted killing has been progressing very fast since the CIA and the U.S.
Air Force deployed the first weaponized unmanned drones after 2001. The first
military drone was the Predator, manufactured by General
Atomics Aeronautical Systems,
a division of General
Atomics headquartered
in San Diego, CA. The same company developed a larger version called the
Reaper, capable of launching Hellfire missiles at their human
“prey”. The newest model is the Avenger, and no doubt that many other versions
will be profitably developed. —This technology has made remote killing
easy, like a video game that isolates the killer from his victim. The moral dimension of this new kind of brutality detached
from humanity has not yet been fully appreciated. Just as it was immoral for
American President Harry Truman to order the drop of nuclear bombs on the
civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, in 1945, it is
immoral for President Barack Obama to authorize targeted assassinations
around the world. Such
remote-controlled weaponized drones, telecommanded from Nevada, for example,
can fire missiles at the houses of foreign nationals in the tribal areas of
Pakistan and in other countries, but they often miss their intended targets
and they hit peasant homes and other private facilities and kill innocent
civilians. Many consider such acts of aggression as state terrorism on a
large scale. Obama has even
usurped the unilateral power of killing American
citizens with
drones without due
process. No other American president has ever claimed to have such a power
outside of the U.S.
Constitution. All this has
made observers reassess Obama’s character and agenda. Just as George W.
Bush was less than candid in making public the moral and legal justifications
for introducing torture in the U.S. military culture, a huge step backward,
Barack Obama has been opaque on the moral, legal and constitutional basis for
his killing program abroad. In Bush’s case, the shaky legal advice to
“justify” torture came from an unknown lawyer of Korean origin,
John Yoo whose torture
memos were made
public for evaluation. In
Obama’s case, to routinely engage in targeting suspected nameless
militants for assassination in foreign countries with which the U.S. is not
at war, his administration has argued that the legal advice offered to the
president is confidential and secret. —This is not a trivial matter. So
far, it has been estimated that the United States has killed 4,700
people abroad with
drone strikes, outside of declared war zones. The Obama administration has
dramatically expanded the use of killing drones abroad. For example, the
Obama administration has increased by 600
percent the drone
strikes that the Bush-Cheney administration had initiated, and this for
strikes in Pakistan alone. At least with
Bush II, people knew who gave the advice and the nature of such advice. With
Obama, everybody is in the dark, including even members of Congressional intelligence
committees, let alone
Joe public. The irony comes from the fact that candidate Barack Obama, in
2008, was a fierce critic of George W. Bush’s national security
policies, notably regarding his approval of interrogation practices widely
seen as torture. Now, all that has emerged to justify targeted assassinations
is an anonymous 16-page
document flatly
stating that the President has such an authority. If this is not the sign of
an imperial presidency, what is? That is why some have begun referring to
Obama as Dictator
Obama. The European
Parliament has recently issued a statement questioning the Obama
administration’s refusal to divulge the legal and moral basis for its
targeted killing program abroad: “We
are deeply concerned about the legal basis, as well as the moral, ethical and
human rights implications of the United States' targeted killing programme
that authorises the CIA
and the military to hunt and kill individuals who have suspected links to
terrorism anywhere in the world.“ In conclusion,
let us say that the Obama administration should be leading international
efforts to outlaw the widespread use of weaponized unmanned drones, just as
gas warfare and nuclear warfare have been outlawed. Sadly, President Barack
Obama is rather promoting their use, making the world an even more dangerous
place. Such weapons, like nuclear bombs, are bound to spread and what's good
for the goose may also be good for the gander. These weapons could come to
haunt the U.S. itself in the future. They don't increase U.S. security in the
long run. They rather reduce it. —Nobody should have the right to kill
just anybody, anywhere in the world. This is the stuff of tyranny. Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, a
Canadian-born economist, is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics,
Ten Humanist Principles”, and of “The New American
Empire”) Please visit
the book site about ethics at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted,
Friday, June 14, 2013, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send
contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in
French) to: N.B.:
Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise. Please
register to receive free alerts on new postings of articles. Send an
email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To
unregister, send an
email with the word "unsubscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To write
to the author: N.B.: This article is distributed privately and without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes, and is not intended in any
way as personal advice of any sort. Disclaimer:
All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly
attributed. _________________________________ © 2013 by
Big Picture World Syndicate, Inc. Wednesday,
March 20, 2013 The Iraq War
Fiasco, Ten Years Later
by Rodrigue Tremblay (Author of
the books “The Code
for Global Ethics”, and “The New American
Empire”) "International
law? I better call my lawyer; he didn't bring that up to me." George
W. Bush (1946- ),
U.S. president (2001-2009), (December 12, 2003) "I
told George Bush as early as August 2002, during a meeting in Detroit, that
we would support him if he receives the authorization from the UN. —I
told him: 'To have the backing of the U.N., it will be necessary that you
establish more clearly that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass
destruction.' —There was no such evidence. Since he [George W. Bush] did
not provide sufficient evidence, he did not get the support of the U.N. ...
Without an authorization from the United Nations, Canada must stay away from
military interventions abroad, even if they are carried out by its allies.
" Jean
Chrétien (1934- ), Prime Minister of Canada (1993-2003), (March 13, 2013) “Those who were 100 percent certain
there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq, before the March 2003 invasion] had
less than zero percent knowledge.” Hans
Blix (1928- ),
former chief United Nations weapons inspector, August 2010 “I am
saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone
knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Alan Greenspan (1926- ), former Federal Reserve
Chairman (in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New
World”, 2007) “He who wants to kill his dog accuses him of having
rabies.” Old French saying
This month marks the 10th anniversary of
the decision by the Bush-Cheney administration to invade the country of Iraq
and initiate what can be called a war
of choice. This is a good time to briefly look back at this
unsavory historical episode. Public opinion
polls
indicate that a majority of Americans now think the 2003 Iraq war,
in which tens of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans died, was a
mistake. In the UK., the other country most involved with the Iraq war, a
similar poll taken recently indicates that only 28
percent of Brits now believe the war was justified and made the world a safer
place. Other polls also indicate that George
W.Bush has a good chance to be considered, if not the worst,
certainly among the worst presidents the United States ever had. The man had no
moral compass. Indeed, his
personal and unilateral decision to launch an illegal war of
aggression in
2003—against Iraq, a country that had not attacked the United
States—based on disingenuous lies, fabrications, disinformation and
propaganda, and in violation of the United Nations' Charter, whose Security
Council refused to authorize the American aggression, will go down in history
as one of those abuses and pretexts that devious politicians resort to when
they want to circumvent international law in order to promote some narrow
personal or national interests. But Iraq had a
lot of oil, and it was
considered in certain circles an enemy of Israel,
a country that the current generation of American politicians supports
blindly. That was enough to want to topple its government and take control of
it. In the summer
and fall of 2002, distressed by what I considered nothing less than a neocon
cabal and a series of outrageous lies by the Bush-Cheney administration, I
began writing a book denouncing the coming war of aggression against Iraq. The book was
initially published in French six weeks before the March 20, 2003 military
assault against Iraq under the title “Why
Bush Wants War” (“Pourquoi Bush veut la
guerre”), a book presently out of print (now a collector's item). It
was published one year later, this time in English, under the title of “The
New American Empire”, and, a few years later, was published
in Europe under the title of “Le
nouvel empire américain” and was also translated into Turkish
under the title “Yeni
Amerikan ImperatorLugu”. The book
described the type of cabal and aggressive war campaign in the Bush-Cheney
administration and in many American media to push the United States toward an
illegal war of aggression in the Middle East in order to overthrow Iraq's
Saddam Hussein regime and to exert an overt influence in the way that country
uses its natural resources. Indeed, the
2003 American war against Iraq was primarily an economic war, because the
government of Saddam Hussein was excluding U.S. and U.K. companies from Iraqi
oil resource development. This was in retaliation for these two countries
supporting unconditionally Israel's decades-long oppression
of the Palestinians. As a consequence, the Bush-Cheney
administration and its vassal Tony Blair in England felt that they had to
intervene militarily in order to prevent French, German, Russian, and Chinese
oil companies to develop Iraq's oil, while U.S. and U.K. oil company
interests were excluded. Basic economic interests were thus at play and
international law was powerless to stop the military onslaught. The pretext
found was to accuse Iraq to harbor “weapons
of mass destruction” that it could possibly and
eventually use against its neighbors. Such so-called “weapons of mass
destruction” were never found because they never existed in the first
place, as the Hans
Blix U.N. inspecting commission had publicly certified. The
entire propaganda operation by the Bush-Cheney administration was nothing
more than a lie and a fraud. Mind you, the
2003 Iraq war was triggered by the Bush-Cheney administration after the
United States was already involved in a protracted war against Al Qaeda
fundamentalist conservatism in Afghanistan, and this since the fall of 2001 under
a United Nations' authorization and in retaliation for this latter country
Taliban government's support for the 9/11 terrorists. Another
oft-repeated lie by the Bush-Cheney administration was that the government of
Iraq had been involved, one way or another, in the 9/11 attack. Not a thread
of evidence has ever been produced to that effect, while all indications were
to the contrary that secular Saddam Hussein was vehemently opposed to the
religiously-bent Al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden. The American
people and a majority in Congress would probably not have supported the Iraq
military invasion had there not have been a barrage of propaganda that
originated from the pro-Israel
Lobby in the media and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Libby-Perle cabal
inside the U.S. government. These two campaigns had a tremendous impact in
persuading a passive public still shaken by the 9/11 terrorist attacks that
the lies
it was fed were facts. We pretend to
live in countries of laws and not of men and that nobody is above the law.
This can be disputed, however, in light of the fact that no one in the Bush-Cheney regime in the U.S. and in the
Tony Blair regime in the U.K. has been held accountable to date for this
massive abuse of power, a prima facie
impeachable offense. Instead, most of the actors in this tragedy have been
rewarded with plush nominations. The U.S. military officially withdrew from Iraq in 2011,
but that country is still in a mess and it will suffer economically and
politically for decades to come the destruction and destabilization it has
been subjected to by the 2003 U.S.-led military invasion. Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, a
Canadian-born economist, is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist
Principles”,
and of “The
New American Empire”) Please visit
the book site about ethics at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted,
Wednesday, March 20, 2013, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send
contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in
French) to: N.B.:
Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise. Please
register to receive free alerts on new postings of articles. Send an
email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To
unregister, send an
email with the word "unsubscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To write
to the author: N.B.: This article is distributed privately and without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes, and is not intended in any
way as personal advice of any sort. Disclaimer:
All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly
attributed. _________________________________ © 2013 by Big Picture World Syndicate, Inc. Thursday,
March 7, 2013 A More Than
Questionable Bernanke Fed Monetary Policy
(Author of
the books “The Code
for Global Ethics”, and “The New American
Empire”) "If
the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their
currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and
corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all
their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered." Thomas
Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd US President "It
is well enough that people ... do not understand our banking and monetary
system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before
tomorrow morning." Henry
Ford (1863-1947),
American automobile industrialist "When
plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society,
they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that
authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." Frederic
Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist It is becoming increasingly obvious that
the Bernanke Fed's monetary policy of fixing short-term interest rates at
close to zero percent,
and (with inflation at two percent or so) of forcing negative real interest
rates, was primarily designed not to help the U.S. economy but to shore up
the super large
American banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy when the
investment bank Lehman
Brothers failed on September 15, 2008. Indeed, with this
policy, the Bernanke Fed has transferred hundreds of billions to these super
banks at a huge cost to the rest of the economy and to international holders
of U.S. dollars. Just as the Greenspan Fed created the housing bubble and let the derivatives market explode, thus sowing the seeds of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Bernanke Fed, using faulty economic analysis, has embarked upon a policy of zero short-term interest rates for many years, —an open-ended QE3 policy of buying mortgages and other financial instruments with newly printed money, thus creating the largest bond bubble in U.S. history. When the distortions
it has created in the U.S. economy unfolds in the coming years, the true
costs of this policy will become clearer. Indeed, when the Fed tries to
unload the financial assets it has acquired from the near-insolvent super
large American banks, in a not too distant future, bond prices will be in
danger of collapsing and nominal interest rates could spike, with a very
negative impact on financial markets and on the real economy. Economists
know that price controls
and price fixing do
not work, at least, not for very long. Credit markets are not immune to this economic reality. In any
market, for any good or service, when prices are fixed by a government or a
government agency below the market clearing price, sooner or later a gap
develops between the excess quantity demanded and the insufficient quantity
offered. The classical
example of resource misallocation is rent control
implemented in some cities and in some countries. The inevitable result of
such a policy is eventually the appearance of a shortage of rental units and
a deterioration in the quality of those still offered. In fact, if any given
government wishes to create housing slums and a housing shortage, it can just
impose stringent rent controls on a permanent basis. This does not mean that
housing cannot be subsidized. But freezing prices is generally not an
efficient way to subsidize housing or any other commodity or service. Now. What
happens when the Fed artificially sets the short-term interest rate at close
to zero for a long period? A long series of negative economic repercussions
follow. -First, large
banks which have access to Fed loans at this artificially low rate will
borrow as much of that newly created money as they can and they will lend
risk-free to the deficit-laden government at two or three percent. Nice trade
if you can get it! -Second, the
demand for bank loans will go up with the banks' prime borrowing rate
artificially low. However, banks will increase their borrowing requirements
for private borrowers since they can invest their excess reserves risk-free,
either at the Fed itself, albeit a low rate, or by lending to the government
at a higher rate. Private borrowers will be frustrated and valuable projects
may remain under-financed, while the government has little incentive to curb
its deficit. -Third, banks
and their preferential clients will use part of their excess reserves
obtained at close to zero percent to buy financial assets. Stock prices and
bond prices will go up. -Fourth, other
investors such as insurance companies and pension funds, with the knowledge
that the Fed will keep short-term rates low for an extended period of time,
will buy staggered long-term bonds and keep their prices artificially high,
when one considers the inflation risk and the time risk involved. -Fifth, with
borrowing rates so low for so long, some financial operators will begin
buying up companies with leveraged money, thus placing finance ahead of
industry. —All of this translates into negative economic and financial distorsions in the long run. Maybe that's the
reason the Bernanke Fed seems so popular on Wall Street. It has been a
powerful tool for asset reflation. I even personally heard a financial commentator
on the CNBC financial TV network declare that Ben Bernanke was the
“best Fed chairman, ever” because he was being credited for a
stock market rally! Such is not the consensus among economists and on Main Street, where savers and retirees on fixed income have seen their revenues collapse over the last five years. That reminds me how Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was venerated on Wall Street, that is, until it became clear that his policy of low interest rates, easy money, junk mortgages and inadequate banking regulation brought down the financial house of cards. In economics, there is no magic, and the piper has to be paid sooner or later! I don't know if it is because of the fact that the American central bank and its federal banking system is partly owned by large private banks, or because there are so many bankers who sit on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), (the committe that sets interest rates) and who are in conflict of interest, but the Fed has a recurring and nagging tendency to create financial bubbles and economic booms and busts that end up—more often than not—benefiting large banks and their CEOs, at a huge cost to the real economy. The Fed is really an institution primarily designed to subsidize large banks with public money. The American
government itself subsidized the large banks with its $700 billion TARP program. We agree that the Fed had to intervene during the
financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers, whatever its
role in creating that crisis. However, did it have an obligation to keep
subsidizing the super large banks for five years or more and dump the cost on
the rest of the economy while imposing very little restraint on their lax behavior?
I don't think so. The Fed cannot
argue that without such a prolonged subsidy policy, the economic
recovery after the 2008-2009 recession would have been thwarted. In fact,
this has been the slowest recovery from a recession since WWII. And the
Bernanke Fed should share some responsibility for that. But now that the
Bernanke Fed has dug itself into a monetary hole, it should be extra prudent
and careful in reversing course, less it precipitate the U.S. economy into
another recession. People have suffered enough in losing their jobs and, for many, their homes, and for many retirees, the income from their savings, without again being the Fed's victims. Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, a
Canadian-born economist, is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist
Principles”, and of “The New American Empire”) Please visit
the book site about ethics at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/ Posted,
Thursday, March 7, 2013, at 5:30 am Or click Here. Send
contact, comments or commercial reproduction requests (in English or in
French) to: N.B.:
Messages may be published in our weblog, unless you request otherwise. Please
register to receive free alerts on new postings of articles. Send an
email with the word "subscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To
unregister, send an
email with the word "unsubscribe" to: bigpictureworld@yahoo.com To write
to the author: N.B.: This article is distributed privately and without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes, and is not intended in any
way as personal advice of any sort. Disclaimer:
All quotes mentioned above are believed in good faith to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some may not be correctly
attributed. © 2013 by Big Picture
World Syndicate, Inc. |