Bush Legacy: Total Devastation of All He Surveyed

This is how Tom Engelhardt sums up Bush's Ponzi Presidency:

Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar -- of destruction.

Veni, vidi, vastavi... [I came, I saw, I devastated...]

Bush's ravaging of the planet (not discussed in the article, which focuses on military and economic devastation - ah, so much devastation, so little time to account for it all...) was perhaps in part due to his focus on destruction of the people ON the planet and their well-being, in failed, ill-devised, idiotically-administered, compassion-be-damned wars. Oh, and bloating the military into its own iron bubble. Wars, too, can be a Ponzi scheme. Not just the economy anymore.

Mr. Engelhardt's synopsis reminds us that it's not only Bush:

Between 1945 and George W. Bush's second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet's financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the Cold War, always came in a provincial second.)

Which was, of course, due to a strong military focus by the U.S. in trying to "round up the world" by military domination coupled with soft-sell propaganda.

In the wake of the Cold War, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.

Or in other words,

In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the U.S. military fought in those decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful.

Yet the gung-ho Bush war-neocons wanted full speed ahead:

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters -- and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose first tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word bellicose. They were prejudiced towards war.

This seems to have always been the Republican line: patriotism means pro-war, and what's important is to have a war. The consequences of it are immaterial. The logic, the motivation, the reasons why are all out of question. Republicans want war - ours is not to reason why; ours is but to fight...and die.
And so this analysis of American "victories" show how, in fact, they were anything but:

Yes, it had "won" largely meaningless victories -- in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein's helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995 (while meeting disaster in operations in Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993). On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power.

Of course, Mr. Engelhardt's article is about body counts, and how Bush avoided them. Yes, he counts the tally of "victories", but the true cost of devastation is not publicized. And with good reason:

... the military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it represented a tacit admission of policy collapse, a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration which never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.

That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans -- civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men -- were dying in prodigious numbers.

And those numbers of casualties, the dead among supposed "enemies" who in some ways come off more as "victims" - the civilians, the children, the families, and in Gitmo, even the accused "enemy combatants", at least the ones arrested as minors... - only served to reveal the human tragedy behind Bush's failures. Thousands of dead, many of them innocents who never would have done anything to U.S. citizens, soldiers or otherwise, had we not invaded, uninvited, and created havoc everywhere we went.

Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques (including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions) to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps 26 million.

United Nations representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile -- exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death -- and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, remained "internally displaced."

Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country (while even TomDispatch has attempted to keep a modest count of wedding parties obliterated by U.S. air attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq). But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known.

One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should increasingly be portrayed here as a limited Bush administration "surge" success. Only a country -- or a punditry or a military -- incapable of facing the depths of destruction that the Bush administration let loose could reach such a conclusion.

Ever heard of an economic meltdown? And now...the planet, please...

When Is Money Not Money? When It Is a Ponzi Scheme

So you think you understand finance? Do you think anybody understands finance? Does the Secretary of the Treasury understand finance? Well...according to this website:

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions — including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices — and robbing you of the value of your money.

Could this be what's behind the whole economic collapse we're now trying to dig ourselves out of by selling bad debts to China? And would that then rob the Chinese of the value of their money?

Not only is virtually the entire money supply created privately by banks, but a mere handful of very big banks is responsible for a massive investment scheme known as "derivatives," which now tallies in at hundreds of trillions of dollars. The banking system has been contrived so that these big banks always get bailed out by the taxpayers from their risky ventures, but the scheme has reached its mathematical limits. There isn't enough money in the entire global economy to bail out the banks from a massive derivatives default today. When the investors realize that the "insurance" against catastrophe that they have purchased in the form of derivatives is worthless, they are liable to jump ship and bring the whole shaky edifice crashing down.

But Fareed Zakaria says China CAN bail out this system. If not, what exactly does "the whole shaky edifice crashing down" look like?

This article suggests that what has happened is nothing less than "The Collapse of a 300 Year Ponzi Scheme".

All the king’s men cannot put the private banking system together again, for the simple reason that it is a Ponzi scheme that has reached its mathematical limits. A Ponzi scheme is a form of pyramid scheme in which new investors must continually be sucked in at the bottom to support the investors at the top. In this case, new borrowers must continually be sucked in to support the creditors at the top. The Wall Street Ponzi scheme is built on "fractional reserve" lending, which allows banks to create "credit" (or "debt") with accounting entries. Banks are now allowed to lend from 10 to 30 times their "reserves," essentially counterfeiting the money they lend. Over 97 percent of the U.S. money supply (M3) has been created by banks in this way. The problem is that banks create only the principal and not the interest necessary to pay back their loans. Since bank lending is essentially the only source of new money in the system, someone somewhere must continually be taking out new loans just to create enough "money" (or "credit") to service the old loans composing the money supply. This spiraling interest problem and the need to find new debtors has gone on for over 300 years -- ever since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 – until the whole world has now become mired in debt to the bankers’ private money monopoly.

And what happens when this long-standing house of cards falls? And what will finally call their bluff? Apparently, their bluff will be called by none other than the earth itself.

As British financial analyst Chris Cook observes:

"Exponential economic growth required by the mathematics of compound interest on a money supply based on money as debt must always run up eventually against the finite nature of Earth’s resources."

So what is the solution - if any?

The parasite has finally run out of its food source. But the crisis is not in the economy itself, which is fundamentally sound – or would be with a proper credit system to oil the wheels of production. The crisis is in the banking system, which can no longer cover up the shell game it has played for three centuries with other people’s money. Fortunately, we don’t need the credit of private banks. A sovereign government can create its own.

And how can we "grow our own" banking system without becoming essentially government-run, which sounds like - thunderstorm sound effects with Halloween music, please - "socialist"?

Ask Ron Paul, maybe? Or is the Government By the People not such a horrible thing after all? At least, not as horrible as a Ponzi-Scheming Banking Cartel Not By the People.