Showing posts with label Eisenhower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eisenhower. Show all posts

03 January 2008

From GW Bush to the FIFTH dimension...

The present decade presents certain intertwined stories of George Bush, Blackwater, Halliburton and KBR in Iraq, of al Qaida in Iraq, of neoconistic empire–building, of capitalism's race to deplete the resources of sustainability:

is a discombobulated, five-dimensional puzzle that many Americans are ignoring, while the Planet gazes on in dismay

Like deer in a car's headlights, wallowing blindly, the great majority of US voters are retaining historic allegiance to moribund political philosophies that exist, today, only in name.

The 'dimensions' of this explosive puzzle are:


Temporal

Economic

Geopolitical

Political

Philosophical


The truth about George W Bush, his neoconservative supporters, and the damage wrought by his misAdministration, is more ludicrous than that word could convey.

Yet anyone's imagination, directing itself into the totality of the concept, is too outrageously discordant; most intelligent rationalists ponder the fragments alone, which they may easily grasp, while thinking that equals the whole of the 'real world' (as we know it).


Irrational as it sounds, it's important to know when and how this dilemma will be resolved, and upon completion of the Bush debacle, the incongruous facets of its reality should unite, jointed or meshing as tightly as Inca pyramidal walls.


Temporal Dimension


In eight years under Bill Clinton, it wasn't the downsizing of the US Armed Forces that torqued out America's future.


It was a much simpler fact: after some twelve years of US involvement in both Vietnam and the benign Space Race, then the eleven–year Reagan-Bush (the Greater) defense build-up through the Iran–Contra scandal, the 'war on drugs' in South America, and the Persian Gulf War, the conservative, then neoconservative dream – of perpetually growing America's Permanent Military Industry – was shut down: for the first time in some 25 years or more.


A paradox emerging from this 'peace dividend', which today continues to serve as evidence; how the Republicants used Clinton's concerted efforts to 'streamline' the military
as an insult of his capacities, when these were in fact based on recommendations inherited in part from the Defense Secretary of Bush the Greater: Dick Cheney.


Peaceful expansion of the US knowledge economy created a critical–mass economic growth explosion from Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Cisco and so many other companies, all creating their proportional empires which re-channelled wealth and investment flows away from Aeronautics, Defense industries and other dinosaurs of the pre–knowledge economy.


Similarly to how the hippie counter-culture had once almost 'derailed' the US war markets, the 1990s introduced the Geek Revolution, which rapidly overshadowed the US war machine.


At nearly the same time, coincidental geopolitical events were taking place in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq; events that were causing certain men, the likes of whom James Baker III would be sharing lunch hour meetings, to discuss the major impact on US business and its economy.


Thus, temporally and temporarily the Nineties were a decade without massive growth in US military expansion or influence. That is NOT a bad concept.



Economic Dimension


Permanent Military Keynesianism (PmK) is the term by which certain economists have categorized a new form of government spending, which flips upside–down the very core of governmental conceptualization, usually the most disdained by 'conservatives'.


Conservatives are historically said to be (and boast incessantly) for less government, which is linked with greater business freedom (remember that Fascism in government theory, relates a strong interrelationship between business and government).


Conservatives cringed when, during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt invented the multiple Agencies that rebuilt the American work force by work projects to improve National Parks and many other grand infrastructural oeuvres. That peacetime mobilization helped build the working momentum for a new war effort.


Keynesian theory was named for noted economist John Maynard Keynes, who called upon governments to boost just these types of grand scale projects in times of recession or depression, beyond budgeted expenditure levels, as a boost to jump–start a sickly performing economy.


Conservatives, or Republicans if and when they return to normal party principles, detest the Keynesian theory expressly because its implementations are countercyclical: government may be 'spending' money it hadn't yet received as tax revenue.


Thus the flip side, from Keynesianism to Permanent Military Keynesianism, involves an unstated need by the Puppet Mastered, formerly conservative Republicans, to sustain the growth of a War Economy as a cancerous destruction of a healthy balanced economy... mindful that this was clearly predicted by America's greatest modern era military commander, Dwight D Eisenhower:


"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."



Notwithstanding these immortal, true phrases, there is no part of the Bush clan, or their friends, that is opposed to skyrocketing gasoline prices (profits!)... a win–win opportunity for those in the highest American echelons, as their oil stocks rise in value, as exploration companies dust off equipment that is now viable, since oil reserves that were previously unthinkable, due to high expense for the return on investment, are now amply–priced for a fat profit margin.


Billions stolen in Iraq, fraudulent contractors operating in Iraq, all taking outrageous profits from fellow US Taxpayers, as more billions are siphoned into the coffers of Big Oil Companies, through excessive profits as a result of dwindling reserves and acutely–focused attacks or distortions of relevant economies such as we see this week in Kenya...

Kenya? Bush?? Don't get it?


Scientists talk about '
entropy theory' in terms of thermodynamics; in a simplistic example, any closed system has working energy and 'wasted energy': as the wasted energy increases, the stability of the system is degraded.


Excessive military spending, had Eisenhower been a scientist and not a general, could have been stated as a simple entropic waste of governmental resources, that could be building homes, schools and hospitals, instead of an insatiable supply of deathToys.


Geopolitical Dimension


Bush and Rove taught EVERY political Chief of any country how to blatantly steal elections, forcing the citizens of the world to ponder the essential meaning of 'Democracy'.


The Bush misAdministration has encouraged and educated (passively, at the least) various Heads of State, from Putin to Hu Jintao in China, how to deal with 'domestic political opponents', through misuse and abuse of the all–encompassing label of 'terrorist'.


Moreover, pushing the neoconservative political agenda towards its most extreme points, Bush and his cronies, puppet–masters or disciples are achieving the opposite of their rhetoric, as they prop up the fading Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan, while proclaiming support for democracy in all the Islamic countries.



The times we are witnessing, show that the roles of governments around the world have a sense of 'take what we can grab, however we can take it!'.


Political Dimension


While back at home, Bush presents AND represents the worst aspects of PmK, siphoning off hope for a better world (except in his rhetoric), through the massive deficit 'War President' campaigns of Fear and Terror, that he waged under the maniacal tutelage of Karl Rove. Campaigns abroad fed into political campaigns at home: the 2002 and 2006 Congressional campaigns were waged against a fear–driven public, as well as in 2004, during the reelection campaign of Bush the Lesser.


With the MIC (military–industrial–complex) rooted like dandelions across every Congressional district in our country, a long process that now seems irreversible, the MIC has mutated, since the loss of Bush the Grand in 1992. Here at ZEN Central, the transformation into the

Petroleum–Military–Communications–Industrial–Complex, or PMCIC,


... has created a seamless web of petroleum–related industries (including of course the prime addicts: automobiles), communications and media, and industry (in general, and of course defense or aerospace), a complex fascist influence on US government policy.


No politician in America can combat the 'PMCIC'... they are 'selected' through a monetization process, selected for 'name appeal' and possessing a ZERO Fuck UPs history (or better: ZERO unexplainable Fuck Ups).

There's a corollary to this statement: any politician who comes out in favor of reducing the military, reducing US dependence on petroleum imports, reducing Health Care costs, reforming the US media through the FCC, is NEVER going to win office, under our present corrupted system.


Philosophical Dimension


More than two hundred years ago, Western civilizations, under monarchic economies, worldwide conquest campaigns, and the hubris of hegemony over foreign peoples, cultures and traditions, produced 'the Enlightenment' in both a spiritual and secular sense.


Manifest Destiny became the rallying cry for US policy, as it conquered, then negotiated treaties with Native American tribes, all of which treaties were promptly and continuously broken.


Somehow, that feeling of superiority transcended itself, in the second half of the Twentieth Century, as America 'saved Europe' twice, leapfrogging over the older European States in economic prowess, bolstered by the rising exportation of cultural manifestations: films, music and TV, as well as consumer goods that flaired in the nostrils of younger generations.


America succeeded in Coca Cola'ing the world, in McDonalds'izing the planet, a commercial victory over communism that politics could never countervail.


But as the world sought to keep up, to take the economic role of cheap labour provider, as economic advancement farmed off 'old tech' jobs (making lightbulbs, tires, running shoes, etc) to distant shores.


Those peoples all yearned, as well, for compensatory purchasing power to sustain these markets, the Homeland attitude in America was growing stronger, in the neoconservative model of life in the Twenty–first Century.

The philosophy of fear, combined with the enjoyment of consumer goods consumption, equates in near totality with the concepts presented in the work of a dystopian future:





1984




Conclusion


Through the advent of the Military Industrial Complex, its evolution into the PMCIC, and the moral degeneration of politics in the United States, it is clear that a trend has been established, of reducing citizens into two (not mutually exclusive) classes:


the Sellers

the Buyers


One can simply decipher one's location on any two–axis graph, how high up the 'food chain' one's life is.


This presumes one has accepted to climb a ladder of advancement and achievement in their society, at the personal level.


How, in the future, momentous shifts away from overwhelming Defense budgets, over–depleting of natural resources, over–fishing of ocean populations, and over–consumption are to be effected, is a question affecting every living being.


America has for some years now, and that means 'AMERICA' as the abstract ideal of a world that once admired our ideals much more than today, been on a road that is perfectly described by 'short term gains'.


Gains for politicians, to get elected without taking any stands.


Gains for capitalists, to increase profits today, by ignoring 'external costs', climate change and resource depletion.


Wherein the gains for a common, persevering man or woman? A family? Their 'Seventh Generation'?


Look elsewhere than to the United States, as once people's backs turned away from Rome.
Hear this, however: the end of the Roman Empire did produce something of rare note...


the Dark Ages


How justifiable to ponder that, as petroleum passes One Hundred dollars the barrel, in a simple supply and demand ratio that won't retrograde significantly.

And tomorrow, we begin to fathom, the choices that America will offer the world, the world post-Bush...


___çç*******/ ZENmud \*******çç___
© 2008


13 December 2007

NOT good NEWS


Once upon a time, there was a country that had 'EVERYTHING', and it was the envy of the world it shared... and it was warned, by Dwight Eisenhower, in 1960.

Its currency, respected and held around the world, facilitated the purchase of petroleum, especially to power THE CAR.

From T-birds to T-Bonds, the world has been transformed in many ways, during these last forty years, and that tout-puissant country, yet again, is resisting any calls upon it to 'tighten its belt', to arrest the expanding burden it places on a fragile global eco-system, and even worse:

Its currency, the once-almighty DOLLAR, has pistoned its value into the collective toilet, as the GROSS VALUE of AMERICA falls daily.

SIDEBAR: In its 2005 report: WHERE IS THE Wealth of NATIONS? Measuring Capital for the 21st Century (The WORLD BANK, Washington, D. C.), its team of authors established a 'wealth value per capita' for each country on our beautiful planet; the data in this crystelZENmud post comes exclusively from their numbers, and ZENmud productions' own derivative calculations.


If a country, say... Saudi Arabia, wanted to buy the ENTIRE United States: every business, every resource, every personal bank or savings account, every tangible and intangible asset, the World Bank estimated the US total wealth to be roughly USD 14,466.8 BILLION (in 2005 dollars). Based on a population of 282 million persons, this number was equivalent to 'each citizen' having a share in the total wealth, per capita, of 512 thousand dollars (rounded numbers).

In our day, as we near 2008, we also hear that Bush and Congress are agreeing on a 696 BILLION dollar defense budget, for fiscal year (FY) 2008.

What does total wealth and defense spending have to do with each other?

Simply, it points out yet again how disastrous US governmental response has been, perpetually, when regarding the sum of material benefits accruing to the Petroleum-Military-Communications-Industrial-Complex (PMCIC), rather than to the common citizen of our country.

Remember that the Saudis *could* have bought the United States, lock-stock-and-barrel for some 14,466.8 BILLION dollars in 2005. If they had wanted to pay this in Euros, that would mean that the King of SA would have to fork over some 12,354.4 BILLION Euros (given November 2005 exchange rates).

TODAY?

Bargain CITY, my friends, my fellow patriots: the Republicant Party has succeeded, through the amazing drifting spiral of US domestic and foreign policy, in achieving the unthinkable.

Our astute Saudi King, if he had chosen to purchase all of the United States today, would only have to pay 10,406.5 BILLION Euros, and all the while receiving the bonus from economic growth these last two years: likely estimates today, of US total value, should range above 15,000 BILLION dollars.

ANALOGY:

Say you wanted to buy a US-made LEXUS in 2005, after returning from your two-year assignment in Paris, with your hands full of Euros.

Say it cost $50k in 2005. It would have cost you Euro 42,760 for your new car, in November, 2005.

But TODAY?

A $51k car, in the US, priced in Euros, would cost you only Euro 34,744!

And this car analogy is perfect, as we read in the International Herald Tribune from Tuesday, that Alfa Romeo, a division of FIAT, is seriously considering the opening of a production plant in the US, to reintroduce its cars to the American market.

READ THIS CAREFULLY:

European automakers want to SAVE PRODUCTION COSTS.

The cost of an average American auto-worker is now TEN DOLLARS per hour CHEAPER than average Western European countries' labour costs, such as France (Peugeot, Citroën), Germany (Porsche, Mercedes, VW), Italy (Fiat, Ferrari).

European automakers would not be considering massive, expensive relocation of PRODUCTION FACILITIES if they believed that the current sad status of the dollar was going to REVERSE course in the near future.

In only two years, a growing wealth base in the US has now become worth some FIFTEEN percent less (15 %, in EURO terms) than a smaller wealth base would have been two years ago.

And how does the American Eagle feel, about becoming the source of cheaper labour for a strengthening EUROworld?

America cannot ignore the world it shares, via the bias of the media which 'serves' the public. Should it continue to do exactly what it does best: ignore climate change, ignore deficit spending Republicant misAdministrations, and worry more about Michael Vick than the Bali Climate Summit, it can only have itself to blame.

This post is merely a warning... ACT or REACT, America: it's your choice...

Courage,

ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç


04 August 2007

Bridges to tragedy...

ZENers

It's as simple as 'guns and butter'...

The classic economics formulation that says with a finite resource base, you cannot buy all the things you want; one has to take a choice:
- eat or defend your territory;
or...
- 'eat or kill' .

You wouldn't know ... without looking up over>>>> there^^^ a bit, that ZENmud was born in Minneapolis, in a blizzard he came home, one fine February day long ago.

But being 10 years older than the 35W bridge,
that sad affair of collapsing steel, concrete and lives... [PHOTO CREDIT: Modesto Bee]

It reminds all of you thinking people that the 'guns and butter' equation shows a simple point that can only be 'spun' in one way...

Others have and will write about the proof of Republican neglect, allowing Our government to starve programs that serve the common good.

Common reports today claim some 70,000 US bridges are seriously neglected, and I assure you that here in Europe, a good many governments are reassuring their citizens that "What happened in the US this week, can't / won't happen here, to our Bridges (Tunnels, Ski Lifts) etc..."

Some may think that it would be a good thing if only Bush-loving Republicans were on that bridge... that would be so unZENly, non?

Read those comments, as many as you can stand.


But remember this: why we are seeing corruption in Iraq-oriented defense procurement, and not in domestic-infrastructure improvements, stems from the simple fact that the leaders of our government, admittedly ideologically radical Republicans, prefer the concentration of corruption in the defense industry.

They prefer GUNS.

It is much more easily controlled, than that which would occur if the TRILLIONS of dollars being wasted under President George W Bush
were to be spread amongst some 10,000 construction companies, rather than say 200 defense contractors.

And guns are lost, destroyed and replaced, updated, researched and refined: an endless Perpetual Military Keynesian spending system, inflating the wrong aspects of US society at the costs of those common good things we prefer to have secured...

We prefer BUTTER.

It won't get better soon, the spiraling effect of deficit Death Toy expenditures must by any angle increase for the next 2 years minimum.
I say that knowing that Bush and Iran are as peaceful and happy as were Bush and Saddam in 2002 and 2003, using President Hussein as a gopher for election results, oil market distortions and control, etc.

So if you like the Bridge across your River, your Highways or your Train tracks... if your airport runways need a bit of tarmac, stop one day, take a picnic even, and check the bridge that carries your children to school or the Mall.

I suggest you take some photos and send them here to store in your trusty ZENvault.


We'll print them, and give you credit.

Brainwashing moment:
"Spend money on infrastructure, not DEATH..."
"Spend money on infrastructure, not DEATH..."
"Spend money on infrastructure, not DEATH..."
"Spend money on infrastructure, not DEATH..."

One could ask Dwight D. ... he knew the difference:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
(From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953)
Dwight, you were the last clean Republican President... you knew what your followers won't acknowledge.


Courage (sigh)

ç*””*”*”*ç*””* ZENmud *””*ç*”*”*””*ç