White House fears liberal war pressure

White House officials are increasingly worried liberal, anti-war Democrats will demand a premature end to the Afghanistan war before President Barack Obama can show signs of progress in the eight-year conflict, according to senior administration sources.

These fears, which the officials have discussed on the condition of anonymity over the past few weeks, are rising fast after U.S. casualties hit record levels in July and August.

The aides also expressed concern that Afghan election returns, still being tallied, will result in a narrow reelection for President Hamid Karzai that could result in qualms about his legitimacy — “Tehran II,” as one official put it, in reference to the disputed Iranian election.

The result: some think Afghanistan — not health care — will be the issue that defines the early years of the Obama administration.

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To try to salve critics, the administration has been developing a series of numerical indicators, scheduled to be sent to Capitol Hill by Sept. 24, that are designed to sharpen U.S. goals by measuring everything from civilian deployments to the proportion of the Afghan population that is secured.

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Ah metrics, he should be able to win this war on paper in no time.

One the quotes that Stan has put at the top of this site seems apropos: “The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.”
Andrea Dworkin

But it looks as if the power elites of the Anglo-American West are still stuck in that century-old paradigm from the cresting wave of the British Empire and the dawn of the Age of Oil. Overwhelmingly in thrall to the geopolitics of Ruskin, Rhodes, and Haushofer. A century out of date, on a planet with something like four times the human population it had in 1909, having run through the majority of the earth’s petroleum resources in the process.

Meanwhile, the natural systems of the planet are suffering from wholesale depletion. Largely still taken for granted, shunted to the bottom of the list of priorities requiring action. Given lip service, and then ignored. The monetary systems and networks of earthly power remain the focus of political priorities. Notwithstanding all of their petty internecine squabbles and maneueverings, the contemporary world of political leaders, industrial and financial elites share a common bubble of privilege, convinced of their own agendas. What the Tao Te Ching refers to as “private ends.” Wedded to the perpetuation of their own goals of personal success, translating from that perspective into an unreal view of the world, and of the human future- right up to the point where the wave comes crashing down.

And despite that looming future, the rest of us have to find ways to shift for ourselves- both as individuals and as communities that adhere to pro-human, pro-ecological values. Something more worthwhile than sociopathic survivalism- that false path co commonly held up by the output of the Entertainment Media Complex as glamorous, desirable, even optimal, under conditions of societal upheaval.

I am writing from Beijing as I am at Tsinghua University and will be giving lectures on critiques of Neoclassical Economics. I was at the 16th Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological (grave robbing) “Sciences” where I gave papers on The Survival and Sustainability of the Blackfoot Nation” and “Indigenous Epistemology and Science: Some Parallels and Contrasts With Neoclassical Theory, Complexity Theory and Dialectical-Historical Materialism.”

It is interesting that the philosophical positivists of the Neoclassical persuasion kept insisting that the sole test of their a-priori hypothetico-deductivist models (logic and adequacy of assumptions) lay in preciction and accuracy of same; and now they have been totally repudiated with global crises their bogus paradigm said could never happen, and with high priests like Greenspan repudiating their own polemics and paradigm, they now retreat to new assumptions and claims to consider all the stuff (history, context, etc) they explicitly rejected as irrelevant and even a messy distraction.

take care and glad to see you are keeping on keeping on.

wei ren min fu wu (Serve the People)

Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi

Here is another from Michael Hudson, our old A-List buddy:

What will people think this winter when markets continue to shrink? How thick is Obama’s Teflon?

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Thanks for the note and I’m sorry I have not been in touch. I had a close brush with our old friend Mr. Death not long ago followed/coupled by the usual stuff with the Neanderthals at work. I’ll be going to a conference on Indigenous Cultures and Cultural Renewal/Preservation in Kunming China near where my father flew 94 missions in B-25s with the 490th Bomb Squadron (Burma Bridge Busters) of the 14th Air Force successor to the Flying Tigers. After that I will be giving some lectures on Economics at Tsinghua University and maybe Beijing University in Beijing and to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Here is what I’ll be doing in Kunming and I’ll write something about it when I get back. I hope you are doing well and I am glad to see you are still keeping on keeping on and sharing your considerable knowledge and insights.

keep the faith,

Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi

Notice of Topics and Program of the Academic Sessions/Panels, IUAES 2009

Dear Chairperson,

Indigenous Epistemology and Science: Some Parallels and Contrasts With Neoclassical Theory, Complexity Theory and Dialectical-Historical Materialism James M. Craven omahkohkiaayo@hotmail.com Clark College, WA July 28 am

Canada-China Symposium
IUAES2009
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Preliminary Program
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July 28-29, 2009
Yunnan University, Kunming China

2009?7?28-29?
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Managing Ethno-Cultural Diversity:
Comparisons of Approaches to Multicultural Diversity

Canada-China Symposium
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Presenters:

l James M. Craven?Clark College, USA?: The Survival and Sustainability of the Blackfoot Nation and Culture in Canada and USA ??????????????“?????????????????”

It is inaccurate to call the current slump a “recession”, which suggests a mismatch between supply and demand that is part of the normal business cycle. In truth, the economy has stumbled into a multi-trillion dollar capital hole that was created by the reckless actions of the nation’s largest financial institutions. The banks blew up the system and now the country has slipped into a depression…

…If Congress fails to see through this ruse and re-regulate the system, the banks will inflate another bubble and destroy what little is left of the economy.

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Too much stress has been laid specifically on the housing bubble, as though it was a necessary and sufficient condition of the crisis. It was only one part of a much wider run-up of debt. Table 1, overleaf, shows the ratio of debt to gdp for the us economy as a whole, and for the two most indebted sectors—households and finance—for 1980 and 2007. The overall ratio more than doubled, and that for the financial sector increased more than fivefold.

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And another one from Michael Hudson today:

In reaching across the aisle for Republican support – and no doubt future campaign contributions from the financial sector Pres. Obama is morphing into Joe Lieberman. There also is a touch of Boris Yeltsin in his sponsorship of a financial “reform” ominously similar to what advisor Larry Summers backed in Russia – relinquishing government power to a banking elite. The Financial Regulatory Reform proposal promotes Wall Street’s “product,” debt creation, at the expense of the economy at large, and lets financial chieftains continue to self-regulate the debt industry – and to keep scot-free all their gains from the past decade’s worth of fraudulent lending.

Confronting the wreckage of a debt crisis worse than any since the Great Depression, Mr. Obama has achieved what no Republican could have: rescuing the Bush Administration’s pro-creditor policies that fostered the Bubble Economy in the first place. “Most of the financial sector lobby community is happy with what has emerged,” the Financial Times summarized. A spokesman for the Financial Services Forum, a major Wall Street lobbying organization, called the proposals “careful and balanced.”1/ With such endorsements, victims of predatory lending have good reason to worry. The Obama plan is just the opposite from reforming the financial system along lines that progressive Democrats and other critics have urged.

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Obama has said that “we can’t send a protectionist message” in the stimulus bill, or convey to trading partners “that somehow we’re just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade.” The Senate softened the “buy-American” provision in the stimulus bill it passed by stipulating that any government procurement policies comply with World Trade Organization rules. Yet US transnational business interests argued that the language favoring American producers should have been removed altogether.

Yet it is clear that the world economies cannot rely on trade to get out of the current crisis because over-reliance on trade was the cause of the crisis. The export economy over-exported to earn dollars that could not be spent at home, and the import economy, namely the US, over-imported by going into massive debt denominated in fiat dollars that the central bank supplied freely. Deregulation and asset-price inflation were the only US exports for the past decade. Now, in a panic of government intervention, the stimulus package of every government is aiming to maximize national multiplier effects of its fiscal spending. Every government is registering its opposition to regressive protectionism while they adopt policies of economic nationalism.

The anti-trade game of beggar thy neighbor in a race to bottom for wages is changed to a race to the top for maximizing national multiplier effects of stimulus spending. Yet no Western government has yet considered the dire need for an income policy to cure the demand-deficiency problem behind the current crisis. All stimulus programs are focusing disproportionately on bailing out private businesses to help them survive by laying off workers or reducing wages and benefits. This type of stimulus is a key component of a downward spiral of economic stagnation that will last for at least a decade…

… … …

…FDR created a “brain trust” of academicians, writers and social reformers, with direct and frequent access to the White House, exerting critical influence on national policy formulation. New Deal programs were administered by unapologetic ideologues from mid-level bureaucracy with direct operation expertise and experience with government operations, not cabinet members of previous administrations. Such a group has yet to emerge in the Obama administration.

The strategic purpose of the New Deal was to save capitalism from itself. Its priority was to check the downward spiral of deflation and bankruptcies
to restore market confidence by bringing about through government intervention a general simultaneous increase in prices, wages and consumer purchasing power to correct the structural imbalance in the economic system. From early reports, the Obama stimulus package appears light or even nonexistent on raising wages while placing emphasis on keeping asset prices from falling. Until the Obama team takes measures to address the wage/price imbalance, the financial crisis will continue.

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Link to the whole series