JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This simply is not an issue, except for the war-hawk types in America and their followers in Canada.

Most of Canada’s oil industry has been foreign-owned for ages, especially American-owned.

If you are going to go on about foreign ownership, it is America’s ownership which requires concern.

But, no, we don’t hear about that any more.

So why this about China?

Simply a further expression of deep American influence in Canada.

America treats China as almost an unfriendly country, but that is ridiculous, and it is a reflection of America’s military-industrial complex’s way of regarding the world.

If you are going to have foreign ownership in energy – which we do, overwhelmingly in oil – diversification of national interests would be a good policy.

And if you are going to buy lots of manufactured goods from China – which we do and America does in massive amounts – then you need to give them an outlet for investing all those dollars piling up there.

The Chinese have demonstrated themselves good corporate citizens abroad, over and over again – indeed, far more so than America’s constellation of international companies.

China will without question become the world’s most important economy within a couple of decades – no matter what America does or says. If you want to be on good terms with China, you must play fairly with them, something the United States, envious of their growth, does not do.

It is so ironic that massive, international American companies like Walmart or Apple could not even exist today without China.

Last, Nexen represents a tiny percentage of Canada’s total production.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“…its members’ penny-pinching and lack of political will…”

Oh we sure know the United States isn’t “penny-pinching” when it comes to war.

It is fighting more wars than you can count, all on borrowed money, surely providing the example of the most mindless spend-thrift of all time.

What a ridiculous statement Gates makes, considering the mess – sorry, that is, messes – into which the United States has put itself.

 As for “political will,” of course, what Gates really means is the will to do what the United States wants done.

 No one else thinks it makes any sense to stay in Afghanistan.

 No one else – except the great idiot Tony Blair – thought it made any sense to invade Iraq.

 Already, the mandate for a no-fly zone in Libya has been distorted beyond recognition into a get-Gaddafi campaign.

 America’s drones in Pakistan are criminal hi-tech mass murder.

 And there are reportedly secret air operations in Yemen.

 Not only does all of this murderous activity reflect no ethics or human values, it all costs unbelievable amounts of money – money the United States simply does not have.

_________________________

NATO’s prime function, from America’s point of view, is that it serves as a way to maintain its hegemony in Europe under the pretense of cooperation and alliance.

NATO also is used by America as a convenient fig leaf for some of its ghastly behavior, as in “NATO planes bombed targets…” when we know they were American planes exclusively or overwhelmingly.

Eisenhower wisely warned us of the military-industrial complex more than half a century ago.

But things over that time have gone from bad to worse, worse than anything he could have imagined.

America has become a world-scale bully, a rather nightmarish quasi-police state, armed to the teeth, and, with no money, it is always sour when others neglect picking up the bill for its self-declared necessary tasks.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN INTIFADA REPEATED FROM THE TELEGRAPH

The Archbishop has long been one of the West’s most important moral critics, as one might expect from a genuine Christian leader.

Contrast his tough and honest views with the kind of diplomatic pap we typically get from, say, the Vatican.

Or compare his moral bravery with certain American Christian fundamentalists who sound as though their job was to serve as cheerleaders for the American military-industrial complex.

In books and stories about the past, we invariably praise the kind of character we find in the Archbishop.

But in real life, the establishment and substantial parts of the population have no use for them, because their tough views and moral authority call into question accepted clichés and create inconvenient truths.

Recall the powerful and famous scene in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus returns to earth to meet the Grand Inquisitor, and the two have a conversation.

Jesus himself recognizes none of his teachings in the words of the Grand Inquisitor, and the Grand Inquisitor grows irritated with someone he regards as a nuisance, finally sending Jesus off to be heard from no more.

That is, sadly, the immortal truth of how power and establishment welcome honesty, decency, and truth: they don’t, ever.

America has descended to the ghastly moral level of Israel in all of its reactions to 9/11: illegal arrests, kidnapping, torture, assassinations, ignoring international laws and treaties, imposing harsh new laws completely out of the spirit of its Constitution, maintaining an international torture gulag, and making deals with monsters like General Dostum.

When you throw away everything of genuine human value in a place like America, all you are left with is a great imperial power ready to crush anyone with whom it disagrees.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/obama-bin-ladens-assassination-nothing-to-celebrate-and-no-justice-at-all-considering-the-facts-this-is-just-one-more-proof-of-might-makes-right/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/more-on-bin-ladens-assassination-the-nonsence-of-al-qaeda-web-sites-making-announcements-the-nonsense-of-al-qaeda-background-on-bin-laden/

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Well said, Jeffery Simpson.

I believe there is an important contemporary political phenomenon with conservatives few have carefully observed.

As you say, fiscal conservatism has been dead for decades.

Both Reagan and Bush were big, big – truly reckless – spenders.

Yet they always were reluctant to pay the bills for their spending, typically cutting taxes again and again.

Not paying your bills is a fundamental violation of traditional conservative views and ethics, the one part of conservative philosophy I have always regarded well.

So what is a contemporary conservative?

A politician who tries to buy votes with tax cuts. Long ago, conservatives would say that liberal politician tried to buy votes with big, new programs. The conservatives finally hit upon a counter strategy of buying votes with tax cuts.

Tax cuts had the additional advantages of crippling the government’s ability to grow and creating a temporary Keynesian stimulus to the economy.

It has been an effective cheap trick, especially in the United States where hatred of the “fed’rah” government is bred in the bone.

And again, as you say, the one area where there are never cuts, only increases, is in so-called defense (so-called because just ask yourself, when was the last time the United States launched a war to defend itself?). This part of conservatism has applied primarily to the United States, a nation that regards itself as democratic yet continually behaves as a rather arrogant world imperial power.

Indeed, many Americans through a long and complex process of indoctrination Mussolini would have admired – in everything from marching bands, pledges, football homecomings, flags on porches, speeches, songs, social pressures of every description, plus the presence of the military everywhere including recruiters in every campus and high school – almost regard the very meaning of their country as a grotesquely-enlarged cartoon eagle, with its talons out, ready to strike.

And for so many young Americans of humble origin and limited prospects, the military is the key to a paid education, their part of the cheap political slogan, the “American Dream.” Plus a sense of worth, unavailable in McJobs, in a place which so exalts uniforms.

The only way you keep that whole thing rolling forward is with more spending and, truly, more wars – completely against the attitudes of most of the Founding Fathers who were generally traditional conservatives and afraid of standing armies.

So mindless support of the military-industrial complex – thank you, President Eisenhower, the last right-thinking Republican – has become a fundamental part of American conservatism.

Only recently, with the intense influence of the United States in Alberta and thereby on Stephen Harper do we see a bit of this poisonous philosophy coming to Canada.

Of course, the great game American conservatives have devised has within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Much as the former Soviet Union always contained the seeds of its own destruction – immense inefficiencies and endless spending on the unproductive military and security establishment.

The United States is unquestionably stuck on a downward path towards losing its imperial status with vast economic and fiscal inefficiencies and unbelievable spending on a military which never creates anything but waste and destruction.

While the United States remains frozen, much like the proverbial deer in the headlights, countries like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia are making genuine progress as efficient competitors on a grand scale.
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“And this is why there’s a Tea Party movement spreading across North America. Less taxes, less government spending.”

Sorry, the Tea Party is nothing but more of the same old, same old.

There is nothing new in it, whatsoever.

There have been many versions of the same thing, including the “contract with America” of that pudgy old phony, Newt Gingrich.

Just look at the party’s hooking up with Sarah Palin, truly a pitifully ignorant person who understands nothing of economics or, indeed, much of anything else.

The Party is a vehicle – paid for by some wealthy people – to harness the discontent of so very many Americans who really do not understand what has happened to them.

And so many Americans are virtually trained to look for quick and easy answers, trained to respond to celebrities like Palin, and trained not to question the fundamental assumptions of their society.

America’s middle class is in an unavoidable spiral of decline. Real wages have fallen for many years. Its efforts to maintain its situation – through two people working per family and moving out to distant suburbs for cheap land – is about played out.

The world of suburban sprawl and two large cars is coming to an end with oil prices which are only going to go up long-term. And America’s lack of competitiveness in many fields only grows vis-à-vis up-and-coming states. So does its debt of every description. And so do the foolish expenses of its military-security complex.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It has long been only a matter of time until an effective anti-carrier missile is developed.

The Chinese – with their intellectual gift for mathematics, engineering, and computers now financed by a successful economy – have long been good candidates for coming up with it.

After all, they have already, in a short space of time, come up with a working satellite-killer and an advanced thermonuclear warhead comparable to the American W-88.

And, not very long ago, during some American naval exercises in the Southwest seas, a brilliant Chinese submarine commander managed to surface his boat right in the middle of America’s ships, America’s hugely expensive and complex electro-magnetic “umbrella” having failed to detect his boat.

The American Navy was hugely embarrassed and rather shaken by this feat, the result of a new coating and other technologies for Chinese submarines.

I think these events remarkable for a country which spends about 15% of what America spends every year on its military.

There is nothing unsettling about it.

Indeed, I think but am not sure the Russian “sunburn” missile, which spirals unpredictably as it homes in at supersonic speeds, may be capable of sinking a capital ship despite its radar-guided Gatling-gun defenses.

The United States for too long has arrogantly roamed the world’s seas with its aircraft carriers, busy intimidating others, carrying on pointless wars and interventions.

A world of multiple powers will be a much healthier one.

In the way international affairs work, having a single unstoppable super-power is just as unhealthy as having a tyrant running a country.

America itself has suffered seriously in its democratic values and human rights from the decaying effects of its monstrous military-industrial complex.

Remember, America spends more on its military than all other nations on earth combined, and it has done so for a long time.

Remember, that since WWII, America has launched an almost continuous series of ugly wars and invasions and interventions, almost all of them pointless and none of them serving the interests of democracy and human rights. Three million dead in Vietnam, a million dead in Cambodia (destabilized by American intervention), a million dead in Iraq, plus countless lesser savage tolls.

And remember, too, that America is the world’s largest arms merchant, spreading death for profit across the face of the planet.

And, last, remember what Lord Acton said about absolute power.

Meanwhile, despite the fears constantly stirred up by our press and the American government, China has kept to its own sphere and it has not started any wars.
______________________

A link to a reprinted chapter of my book of three years ago may be of interest.

See “China’s New Weapons” at:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/china%E2%80%99s-new-weapons/

______________________

China’s new DF21-D anti-ship missile is a ballistic missile, as opposed to Sunburn which is a ramjet cruise missile which travels about 3 times the speed of sound. The DF21-D is launched much like an ICBM to arch over a region of sea. Its sensors detect enemy ships, and the warhead’s course is altered as needed from its ballistic arch to rain down on a target at hypersonic speeds, the kinetic energy alone of such a strike being adequate to disable a capital ship. This missile is being installed along the coast of China opposite Taiwan to put American carriers at serious risk should they be used to defend Taiwan. The combination of these two anti-ship missiles may well render aircraft carriers obsolete in parts of the world.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

I just love that expression “alleged militants.”

Almost certainly, the deaths in fact were 18 civilians guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And even if one or two were suspects of some kind, this kind of extra-judicial murder is absolutely indistinguishable from the death squads in South American countries which periodically made people “disappear.”

It reminds me of each time Israel kills a batch of poor Palestinians: they are invariably called “militants” in the press.

It’s called demonizing your victim. It also clearly is a ghastly use of euphemism for extra-judicial mass-murder.

George Orwell would have loved this terrible and deliberate abuse of language in the interests of power.

He wrote about just such things in his wonderful essay, “Politics and the English Language,” an indictment of power that remains as true as the day it was written.

And our truth-loving press seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to kill “militants” and even “alleged militants.”

In one stroke the press both horribly abuses language and ignores completely its responsibility to inform people.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Barack Obama is a puzzle.”

Yes, indeed, and I think you’ve described it well.

“His ambitions are genuinely progressive; his temperament is genuinely open-minded. It is a rare and confusing combination, and it explains a great deal.”

Yes, again, but I think there’s more to the mystery than that.

Pragmatism is of course a philosophy claimed by many Americans, even before it was explicated by William James.

But ideology has also always been a feature of American society, often extreme ideology and often colored with religious or quasi-religious beliefs.

That too shouldn’t sit well with pragmatism, but apparently it does.

I put it down to two things in the end.

One is what the fine American historian Page Smith called – misusing a word by standards of our modern understanding – America’s “schizophrenia.”

There are countless examples of this dating back to the Founding Fathers blubbering about freedom while trading in slaves, what the great Dr Johnson called “drivers of negroes” talking about freedom.

Jefferson, that greatest of blubberers on freedom, supported the tyrant Napoleon trying to recapture Haiti, as well acting in a great many other anti-freedom loving ways.

Lincoln started a great bloody war rather than tolerate the South’s right to self-determination. Lincoln may be viewed actually as the founder of the military-industrial complex with his mighty armies and ironclads. Yet Americans think of him as Father Abraham, an epithet having almost nothing to do with Lincoln’s actual character and behavior.

Look at the America of the last half century. It has started numerous bloody wars, killing millions for almost nothing, and coups, yet it insists on using the language of peace and liberty and principles. It just does not compute.

The one national drive that dominates American history is the drive to empire, to expand and to run the lives of others. Naturally, this drive is not contained in the anthems and speeches, but it is always there, subordinating everything else.

So a kind of “schizophrenic” thinking just comes second-nature. Being part of the fabric of the society, it influences thinking in all matters, domestic as well as foreign.

You cannot spend the best part of a trillion dollars a year on the Pentagon and at least fourteen intelligence agencies and pretend there is some unique freedom in America. That is absurd, yet most Americans desperately believe the absurdity.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN FROM THE AP IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This report sounds dramatic, as it was intended to by the American forces supplying the press releases.

It is simply propaganda for the military-industrial complex.

Interestingly, key bits of information are left out.

Why? Because they would be embarrassing.

This “weapon,” as it exists, is regarded as militarily insignificant even by Mr. Gates of the Pentagon.

It must be quite close to its target, a situation unlikely ever to happen in the real world.

Its target must be a slow take-off, liquid-fuel missile.

A modern solid-fuel missile cannot be stopped by this clunky gadget.

There are also many countermeasures which can be taken. I believe, for instance, that the person who has commented that a mirror-coating on a missile renders the laser useless against it is correct.

Anyway, can you imagine keeping a fleet of these clunky machines in the air at all times? Of course not.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHANN HARI IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

Yes, absolutely, the secret prisons in Afghanistan, and those in other places, cast a grim shadow across Obama’s smiling face.

I believe that decisions like keeping America’s torture gulag operating abroad are the greatest source of people’s disappointment with Obama.

But I’m afraid people were being unrealistic to expect much else.

America is an empire, not a dreamy “shining city on a hill,” but a rather brutal society which feels entitled to run the affairs of others in all parts of the planet.

It does this through a combination of its immense economic and military might.

America’s own population lives under a version of Social Darwinism, as relatively few people abroad fully appreciate. There is relatively little sympathy or patience for the concerns of foreigners, a simple but brutal fact.

The American establishment – the intelligence industry, the Pentagon, the defense contractors, and the huge multi-national corporations – do quite literally form a government within a government.

That is not a left-wing fantasy or a slightly paranoid delusion – after all, it was a Republican president and former general, Eisenhower, who first sounded the warning. It is the ineluctable result of this stupendously wealthy and largely unaccountable set of institutions.

A great many dark and devious men hold high positions in this establishment, and they have billions at their disposal plus a general population which is passive in accepting their actions.

Think only of the pointless holocaust in Vietnam. Countless billions wasted, an estimated 3 million Vietnamese murdered in an orgy of killing, and a devaluation of the dollar afterwards to help pay the bill. All of it done for nothing more than the fears and prejudices of that establishment.

The last American President who truly challenged that establishment died on November 22, 1963.

Obama wants to be the elementary civics-class textbook version of a president, the kind of president which the establishment tolerates from either party, not end up being either driven from office in shame or worse.

To talk with genuine expectations about change of any real consequence today in America is utterly naïve. It’s just about as meaningful as talking about change in the France of the late eighteenth century with its dukes and cardinals and princes, whose carriages simply thumped over the bodies of peasants who happened to be in their way.

Yes, a revolution did happen then, but try that in an empire with a military establishment pushing two million, all armed with unbelievably powerful weapons and a set of at least fourteen intelligence services which spy on every phone call and e-mail and even check the books you read at the library.

The French Revolution will never be repeated, and the pathetic American libertarians who naively believe that holding on to their beloved rifles and pistols secures their freedom surely only bring a quiet chuckle from those who know better.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“Republicans, who see themselves as his mortal enemies, with their only goal as that of destroying his presidency and putting what President Eisenhower presciently called the “military-industrial complex” fifty years ago back in total control of this country, as was the case under Bush.”

A perfect example of delusional American thinking.

Under Obama, the evidence couldn’t be clearer that the military-industrial complex is still running things as it has for the last half century. Power that great and concentrated does not ever fade away, and the vast contracts being spewed out in America since 9/11 have fed the voracious beast.

Troops are still in Iraq.

A great many more troops are going to Afghanistan.

American missiles regularly kill villagers in Pakistan.

Far, far more civilians than “bad guys.”

And the same is true in Afghanistan, families are regularly killed by American air attacks.

And now Yemen is threatened, and it has been bombed.

And just today we have the news from General Petraeus that America has contingency plans to bomb Iran.

Guantanamo is still not closed.

Even worse, dark holes like Bagram Air Base in Iraq and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean have who-knows-what going on, certainly involving large numbers of extra-legal prisoners.

Israel ignores Obama’s reasonable words. It continues with its relentless seige of a million and half refugees, and it continues to use cheap tricks daily to steal homes in Jerusalem.

All the silly “Detroit bomb” incident did was renew fears of people who do not think clearly and effectively instantly produce vast world-wide set of orders for an American company’s expensive body scanners, a business bonanza.

By the way, carefully conducted tests of the scanners in Canada shows them failing 70% of the time, but we will all be forced to buy them.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JEFFREY SIMPSON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Govern themselves badly indeed – this is fundamental truth that comparatively few appreciate.

But Jeffrey Simpson may not appreciate how conditioned Americans are to accept poor government.

The widespread hatred of all government and taxation works towards this: as in, do what you like, but do not raise my taxes.

So does the artificial hyper-patriotism constantly drummed everywhere in the society play an important role of immense social pressure.

The drumming has several effects. First, there is a general propensity to see critics of any major policy as unpatriotic.

In the Vietnam era, critics were widely told “to love it or leave it,” a disgusting thing to say to another citizen, but decades later, the same filthy, divisive words are heard concerning the fantasy-induced war on terror.

The Washington establishment – the Pentagon, the CIA plus about thirteen other intelligence agencies, the ancient, almost unchanging Senate, and the major military contractors – almost form a government within a government, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, a genuine breathing presence in American society and not just a turn of phrase.

Obama – as humane and intelligent a man as America can produce – already has been captured in its tentacles. It is hard to distinguish what is going on abroad today from what went on under the ghastly Bush.

That is to say, national elections do not change much today in America.

And this complex eats money, leaving not a lot of room for programs like national heath.

And in such a society, the penetrating sense for so many is one of always living on the edge, just getting by, one step removed from financial chaos, and that sense of things works to the benefit of the Washington establishment’ s demand for resources.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

I believe Obama is dithering, although their may be some truth to the idea of putting pressure on the Mayor of Kabul.

There is a basic conflict at work here: Obama’s decency and humanity versus an American establishment which never hesitates to kill people over pride.

Obama has the weight of the entire military-industrial complex on his back – the half trillion dollar a year industry of professional war-making in the Pentagon, the vast parade of defense contractors who’ve made countless billions from the war – plus the pressure of the Israel Lobby, always in favor of war against Muslims with talk about being soft on terror.

This mission is pointless. You cannot remake the institutions and customs of a nation of about 30 million in a few years.

Imagine invading seventeenth century Spain and telling people that the Holy Inquisition must end, nuns must give up the habit, Moors and Jews must be admitted as full members of society, and women must have equal rights?

Yet that is a close parallel to what the U.S. at least claims it is doing in Afghanistan.

Americans have failed in Iraq and they failed in Afghanistan, just as they failed in Vietnam and Somalia and a number of other places.

You can’t bomb people into democracy or into modernity, but you sure can kill lots of innocent people.

America’s only clear-cut victory goes back to WWII and that required sinking to complete barbarism, using the atomic bomb on civilians.

The basic problem is that ideologue Americans seek the wrong victories.

They are always fighting imagined devils, whether communists or Muslims, instead of dealing in practical terms with the world. And the truth is they don’t really want to fight if it means they suffer real losses. So they bomb. This is a formula for guaranteed failure.

Dropping dollar bills instead of bombs would have been a more sensible policy.

Just dumb.

Now America’s Captain Ahabs risk repeating their insane experience of the killing fields of Cambodia, a neutral country that was secretly bombed and invaded for the same lunatic reasons that Pakistan is now being bombed and driven to kill its own people. With the toppling of a neutral government, Cambodia dropped into the hands of true madmen, and America shares full responsibility for what happened.

But the lessons are never learned by America’s jingo set.

There’s always a new dawn for these ideologues when enough bombing and brutality will get the desired results, even if the poor country on the receiving end is reduced to rubble.

The great irony is, of course, the Taleban never had to America’s enemies. They were not international terrorists, and they attacked no one outside their land. They offered to extradite bin Laden and others if the U.S. just provided some evidence for its claims over 9/11, the normal procedure for extraditions everywhere.

But the U.S. just angrily refused, and it prepared to attack.

The assault on Afghanistan was about absolutely nothing but vengeance. The participation of the UN and NATO was just a diplomatic nicety arranged through the cajoling and threats behind the scenes.

What NATO countries really think of Afghanistan is clear from their response to repeated calls from the U.S. for more forces. The psychology of immediately post-9/11 had been right for governments not to refuse, something they did do a little later with the vast war crime of invading Iraq.

They simply do not regard Afghanistan as a serious threat, and it is not.

But the U.S. is stuck there after getting vengeance – at least 50,000 died just in Kabul from America’s invasion – with no idea of what to do next, and no idea of how to make a graceful exit, and the American establishment’s idea of a graceful exit is what was done to Japan.
_____________________

Some interesting statistics on Afghanistan were released the other day.

From one Afghanistan’s own ministries, it was announced that 12 million people, including 3 million children, out of a total population of 30 million, live in serious poverty. so much so that many of the children are malnourished.

My, what an achievement, America, after 8 years of invasion and occupation and tens and tens of billions spent on killing and destruction.