Mission Accomplished

[ajax13]

"The Bush Administration Was an Ongoing Criminal Conspiracy Under International Law and U.S. Domestic Law

Depending upon the substantive issues involved, those international crimes typically included but were not limited to the Nuremberg offenses of crimes against peace: For example, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, as well as their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran. Their criminal responsibility also concerned Nuremberg crimes against humanity and war crimes as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and of the 1907 Hague Regulations on land warfare: For example, torture at Guantanamo, Bhagram, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere; enforced disappearances, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, “shock and awe,” depleted uranium, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, Fallujah, and the Guantanamo kangaroo courts. Notice that all of their victims were Muslims, Arabs, and Asians of Color.

Furthermore, various members of the Bush administration committed numerous inchoate crimes incidental to these substantive offences that under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as paragraph 500 of U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 were international crimes in their own right: planning and preparation, solicitation, incitement, conspiracy, complicity, attempt, aiding and abetting.

Finally, according to basic principles of international criminal law set forth in paragraph 501 of U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, all high level civilian officials and military officers in the Bush administration who either knew or should have known that soldiers or civilians under their control -- such as the C.I.A. or private mercenary contractors -- committed or were about to commit international crimes and failed to take the measures necessary to stop them, or to punish them, or both, are likewise personally responsible for the commission of international crimes."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=27997

[cmack]

Ah...okay, I'll admit to voting for Bush as the lesser of two evils. I'm glad he's out of office, but his replacement isn't any better. Rather than trying to re-fight past elections, who do you think would make the best President in 2012?

[ajax13]

What do you suppose made Bush the lesser of two evils?  Your question about who would make the best President in 2012 is a loaded question.  In my opinion, a contest of far greater import is the potential battle between Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman.

[cmack]

What do you suppose made Bush the lesser of two evils?  Your question about who would make the best President in 2012 is a loaded question.  In my opinion, a contest of far greater import is the potential battle between Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman.

My personal political philosophy espouses limited government, free markets, individual rights, and individual responsibilities. I don't believe it is the governments place to protect people from themselves. Nor do I believe it is the place of government to rescue people from the consequences of their own bad decision making.

Given the above, I am predisposed to vote for Republicans over Democrats, though my personal belief system is more in line with the Libertarian party. At least the Republicans talk about smaller government. However, I will admit that once in office they don't really do anything about it, and some Republicans do have an authoritarian streak which undermines individual rights and freedoms.

I was never a big Bush fan, but in comparing him to Kerry or Gore I was at least hoping that some of the Bush advisors might be more sensible than their Democrat counterparts. In truth, I haven't cared much for any of the Presidential contenders since Reagan, and in considering twentieth century Presidents, I think my ideal model of what a President should be is Calvin Coolidge.

In regards to Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, what are their positions on the issues?

[ajax13]

No question.  Reagan shrank government down to nothing, to the point where there was no more taxation, no defecits, no debt.  Clearly, if left to their own devices, elites will make only decisions that benefit themselves but in the end benefit all others who are serving their own self-interests.  I never understood why, in the era of industrial America, unions were necessary, nor regulations.  Unregulated and unopposed  by organized labor, capitalists created safe factories and mines, paid wages that permitted workers to then make enough money to become capitalists themselves, and war was unknown because the system, say about 1914 or so, worked great.

[Xelebes]

The government has the right to protect people by holding people to account for foolish or misguided notions.  Romantic leadership coupled with privilege devolves into the very abuses we experienced in the programs or the abusive schools.  Reagan relied on romantic leadership and privilege to cover up his incompetency and achieved, for the most part, sideways results for the things he claimed he would do.  The exceptions were either downright awful or fairly good.

[heretik]

When I think of Reagon and Clinton I look at their approval ratings just before their 2nd terms as presidents. They were high somewhere around 50% which in my mind means these two presidents were resonating with Americans and a lot of them. Their programs were being pushed through and for the most part life was good, business was good. These two men were real leaders (like them or not) they led, they stood out and you knew who was running things.
 Bush and O'Bama I haven't ever felt that they were running this country. Treasury Sec. Geithner runs the country for O'bama and Cheney and Rove ran the country for Bush. I could go on and on concerning the ignorance both of these presidents have where it involves international diplomacy, business and politics.
Men or Women that are qualified no longer want to run. The media has turned politics into a rag mag weekly blog. Dirt and filth are great if you can't find it or make it up so it looks like it. Who cares if this in the end creates more damage to the fragile physic America is feeling today. Just keep piling it on.
The next major problem is the entrenched warfare going on between the two ideologies (if you can even call them that) Republicans and Democrats refuse to work together at all. They can give a rats ass about this country, they have this fantasy that everything will be OK in the end. Well for them it will be OK, they get to walk away with a pension and health care paid for by the taxpayer.

[ajax13]

Ronald Reagan claimed to have particpated in the liberation of Nazi death camps when in fact he spent the war in California.  That fact alone leaves me with total bewilderment about who Reagan the man was, and what his role was during his presidency.  Nothing could convince me that Ronald Reagan led anything.  I am very curious about the two ideologies to which you referred.  I have lived through Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama.  Throughout that time the armed forces of the United States killed people in foreign lands.  Workers rights were eroded and their incomes declined in spite of vast increases in worker productivity.  The massive profits reaped by capitalists were siphoned off from the productive areas of the economy and transferred into speculative finance.  There has been one single ideology in US government, and that is fostering an environment in which the richest get richer, and the rest of the population serves to make this happen.

[Xelebes]

I would not say that philosophy or ideology in the US has been solely to make rich get richer.  There has been technology leaps in the last 40 years that have left the law in the dust.  The biggest is decision-point automation (computers and robots.)  This development has left the person working on the factory lines unable to compete with the new hardware.  Some of the philosophies have clashed - the philosophy that we should focus our human resources more into higher level decision making and the philosophy that people hold dear hand-crafted goods over the expendable but necessary manufactured goods.  The first relies heavily on colleges and universities to provide it while the other has seen shop floors disappear in schools and technical schools remain stagnant.

There are other distortions going onand they do protect some people's wealth but for the most part, we have to start recognising what decision-point automation means and focus the development of labour to providing services to each other (design, health care, education, and entertainment.)

Reagan's policies are lifted directly from the hot economics of the 70s where people were postulating with the same tools as the Keynesian economics save for the experimental data.  The truth is that Keynesian economics was derived at a time when historical analysis and auditing was crucial to determine how things fell so precipitiously while the economists of the 70s were left studying the same data and left to their wits to come up with an opposing theory.  Behavioural economics, something that may have only been in it's most bare beginnings at the time only became a whole school of investigation in the 2000s, and we have yet to come up with enough significant analysis to come up with policies grounded on it.

That being said, Reagan pretty much relied on using sweet words to comfort the people who had just come out of the precipitious 70s, in much the same way as Obama had.

[ajax13]

So it was an inability of American workers to compete with computers that led to the transfer of the manufacturing sector to China, and to the creation of a an economy where finance has supplanted commodity production, with the exception of course of arms manufacturing which is  financed entirely by public debt?

[Xelebes]

Well, the transfer of jobs has many other factors.  The transfer of jobs began with Japan and Germany in the 70s - two economies destroyed in the World War and had just finished rebuilding, using their technical expertise.  In the 1970s, the Detroit automanufacturers were experiencing serious lag on their production models and rather peculiar rigidity which began with Henry Ford's decision to not yield to customer demand for customisation.  Japanese automanufacturers, namely Toyota, took advantage of that lag and began to offer customisation using just-in-time delivery and manufacturing.  Thus the Detroit automanufacturers would face some serious competition which they had not planned to face.  The development of robots in the factory allowed just-in-time manufacturing to be much more efficient.

So all that took place in the 1970s and caused a whole swath of layoffs and a battle with the unions.

A free-trade agreement with Japan had been signed for sometime, so some businessmen either allowed their companies to be bought by the Japanese because they knew that they could the businesses productive.  But with that came more robotics in other industries.  This is where we largely get the Japanese-takeover paranoia motifs in such movies as Bladerunner (1982.)

The transferral of jobs by the 1980s was well under way.  The development of Silicon Valley only provided a reprieve.  Right now, the focus should be providing goods of local distribution (to cut down on transportation costs) and to continue developing new technologies, to remain providing the newest and best, requiring local people to build the goods.  China, Vietnam and India cannot manufacture everything.

There is also other factors like the long-term debt problem facing the North Atlantic economic theatre which will stall any great new expansions of business, forcing people to rely on inheritances to start new businesses.

[ajax13]

Thanks for clearing that up.  So when capitalists took the enormous profits earned through increased productivity brought about by technological advancement, and invested those profits into speculative finance, it was because Toyota could customize a Corona before it was shipped across the Pacific?  And the outsourcing of manufacturing to the third world and then to communist China was a result of Japan and Germany's technical expertise being brought to bear in the aftermath of the war.  Got it.

[Xelebes]

The outsourcing is bound to happen.  Remember the textile industry in the US came from outsourcing by the British.  That and a bit of corporate espionage back in 1780s.  Leaving third world countries without the opportunity to manufacture goods is more of a travesty than having lost some jobs in the US.

[ajax13]

Got it.  So when Lowell was refused licenses for British textile equipment and stole the designs to use in US mills, that was the same as when late-stage capitalists took all the profits reaped from technologically-induced increases in worker productivity and used the capital as seed money for speculation-derived financial instruments.

[Xelebes]

No, the speculative financial instruments came out of increased monetary wealth but too little to spend on.  Folks like Clinton and Greenspan decided that the US dollar should be high, despite the imbalance, and so allowed machinations and various forms of debt to create AAA grade debt.  There was enough room for the lower grade debt for speculation.  The speculation on AAA debt was due to people running out of places to continue putting that debt.  Speculative financial instruments are not that bad - they let one hedge against being too conservative, when one's debt owned is accruing interest below various inflation measures.

Another development I should also mention is the pension bubble that was first tested in 1986.  In the late seventies and early eighties, pensions moved away from government maintained to private maintained.  That is, the government knew that Social Security could not keep up with the inflation after the US de-pegged their currency from gold, that they encouraged companies to not only fund the medical insurance (a development of World War II), but also their pensions.  Back then, it was the companies doing all the investment and it drawed a lot of good workers.  A big problem was that this development was exposing the companies to large risk.  1986 was pretty bad.  2000-2001 was worse.  Soon, companies looked to move towards vesting their pensions (passing their portfolio) to the employees for the employees to maintain while also contributing to it.  Anyways, this development created a huge shift of money into the financial markets.  This boosted the US currency value but exposed risk to companies and eventually the burden became too much for companies.  Remember, the reason why the companies agreed to this plan was so that they could draw loyal employees.  Loyal employees could only go so far.

Another issue is the oligopolisation of many industries over this period.  This leads to efficiencies, but makes it less creative as it makes the industries more rigid (there is more overhead attached to these larger companies.)  This can lead to problems.  In a recession, competition gets reduced and, if left unchecked, can leave competition severely skewered.  This is something we probably all know, but it is also worth remembering that we have to sometimes be aware of what is going on and when the relationship between producer and consumer gets abusive.