Dutch disease is when you sell a lot of resources and that makes your currency increase in value.  So if you discover a lot of oil, or oil becomes a lot more valuable because of a shortage so that you can produce tons of oil from the tar sands, you can experience Dutch Disease.

The consequence of your currency being worth more is that products you manufacture cost more for anyone outside your country.  So if Americans want to buy Canadian goods, it costs them more when the US and Canadian dollar are trading at about even than when the Canadian dollar cost only 80 cents American.

If something costs more, people will buy less of it, or they will stop buying from you entirely and buy from someone else who is cheaper.

What happened to the Dutch is that their manufacturing sector collapsed.  What NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, in Canada, is saying is that Canada is suffering from Dutch Disease.  That we are losing manufacturing jobs because of the higher dollar caused by all the oil from the oil sands we’re shipping out of the country, which raises the Canadian dollar.

I observed, many years ago, that the Canadian dollar had become a petro-currency.  It is now inarguable.

It is also virtually inarguable that Canada is losing manufacturing jobs due to the higher dollar.  It’s just arithmetic.  Unless you think price has no effect on sales, you can’t argue otherwise without excessive contortions.

Does this mean that Canada is suffering from Dutch Disease?  Depends where you put the margin.  One study, funded by the federal government, found that:

“We show that between 33 and 39 per cent of the manufacturing employment loss that was due to exchange rate developments between 2002 and 2007 is related to the Dutch Disease phenomenon,” says the study.

I am unaware of studies covering the period since then, and I don’t know if the study was correct.  Personally, I suspect it’s higher than that, but I haven’t run the numbers myself and I probably won’t (unless the Feds want to pay for my time.)

But, again, the argument is simple enough.  Unless you don’t believe in higher prices reducing sales, and reduced sales leading to job losses and company closures, you can’t really argue that the oil sands aren’t hurting manufacturing.  It’s just that simple.

The next question is “should we do anything about it?”

Canada has traditionally had what is known as a mixed economy.  When it comes to exports, we have manufacturing and we have the resource sector, of which oil is just one part.  Resources experience boom and bust cycles.  There is always another resource bust around the corner.  Always.  No resource has its prices stay high forever.  When resources are doing well, they support our exports.  When they’re doing badly, manufacturing takes up the slack.

As with any such oscillating economy, what should be done is that when one is booming, it subsidizes the other.  We don’t want manufacturing destroyed during high resource price periods, because there will always be low resource prices in the future.  So we tax the high resource prices and we subsidize manufacturing.  When resource prices collapse, the manufacturing sector subsidizes the resource sector.

If we allow the manufacturing sector to be badly damaged, it cannot easily be rebuilt when resource prices collapse.  Nations built entirely on resources are and will always be subject to economic collaps when the resource price collapses, and, again, it always does, the question is only when.

Mulcair has also talked about value add and that’s worth discussing.  Shipping raw oil, raw logs, unprocessed fish means you get the lowest prices possible and less jobs.  Value add means you refine the oil in Canada and sell it.  You turn the logs into paper or 2x4s in Canada.  You can or smoke the salmon, in Canada.  This provides jobs and the end goods sell for more.  It may be that processing will increase the price slightly compared to processing in the US or China, but that costs less sales than it would for the equivalent manufactured item.

Why?  Because resources are finite.  There is only so much oil in the world at any given price point.  There are only so many salmon, especially wild salmon.  There are only so many trees, especially trees that are good for construction grade timber.  Other countries will generally buy anyway, because there is nowhere else to get the product.  Sales may decline slightly, but profit often increases and so do the number of jobs in Canada.

When there is a bottleneck, as there is in oil production right now, especially, you can say “no, we’re going to process it here.”  If other nations don’t like it, tough.  They aren’t going to stop heating their houses and driving their cars to their suburban homes.  That is not happening.

So if you can extract a bit less oil, make more money overall, and have more jobs, why not do so?  That’s what Mulcair means by “value add”.

Finally, let’s move to cap and trade, which is what Mulcair wants to do with the tar sands.  Cap and Trade means you cap the amount of carbon emissions allowed by oil sands extraction, and you allow people to buy and sell the right to make those emissions.  You also tax those trades and emissions. You then use the money earned to subsidize manufacturing and research and whatever else will be the future of the country when oil prices collapse, which, again, they will, because resource booms always end, it is an existential certainty.

Once upon a time, the Canadian Maritimes were a resource boom area.  They sold fish, but more importantly they sold trees which could be made into masts, an incredibly valuable commodity.  Today, with pardon to my Maritime brethren, the Maritimes are in semi-permanent depression.

This is the future that Alberta faces.  They should want to be taxed, and they should want that money reinvested in other sectors, because those sectors are Alberta’s future long after the oil boom ends.  And the massive environmental destruction is leaving massive costs which will have to be cleaned up for generations to come, long after the boom days are gone.

Canada’s economy has worked, and we have not become Argentina (the country we would have been compared to before WWII) because of our mixed economy.  It is worth protecting, it is necessary to protect, if we want prosperity not now, but 10 years, 20 years or 50 years from now.  If we care about our children, or even ourselves 20 years from now, we must deal with the effects that massive exploitation of the oil sands is having on our economy and our environment.

Dutch disease is just arithmetic.  It is real, and it can devastate the future of a country.  Non-renewable resources are the epitome of found money, and what you do with found money is invest it in something productive, something which will support you once the found money runs out.

This is Canada, and this is our future we’re talking about.  If we actually care about the children we claim to love, we’ll acknowledge the simple arithmetic of what a high dollar does, and we’ll act to mitigate the damage.

(Update: Antonia Zerbisias had an article in February on Dutch Disease studies which is worth reading.)

When we say humans are weak, what we mean is that they tend to do what they’re told to do, and tend to follow the roles and norms of their society and peer group. We’ll explore this by touching on two famous experiments: the Milgram electroshock experiment and the Stanford prison experiment.

In the Milgram experiment subjects were told to administer painful electrical shocks to another person when that person answered a question wrong. Each time an answer was wrong, the amount of the shock was increased. Sixty-three percent went all the way up to a 450 volt shock, continuing after the person being shocked started screaming, begged them to stop and told them they had a heart condition. With variations, the number who would go all the way could be increased to 91% or go as low as 28%. This result has been replicated time and again since the original experiment in 1963, and has been found to be true in multiple cultures

The sixty-three percent compliance rate was a surprise to psychologists when the result was first published, despite the world having recently seen the Nazi death camps. Perhaps this is because death camp guards were under military discipline and could expect harsh punishment for refusing orders. Or perhaps it is because Americans assumed it was a cultural thing: Germans would do it, Soviets would do it, but Americans wouldn’t.

The students in the Milgram experiment were American and faced no consequences for refusing to shock a screaming man. Most of them shocked the man anyway.

Americans would. People of every culture would.

Milgram’s subjects almost all felt that shocking the subject was wrong. They did it anyway.

Most people will do something they believe is wrong if told to by a figure in authority.

If you read the results of the variations on the Milgram experiment three things stand out. First, that you can get the compliance rate very high, to the point where about nine out of ten people will torture. The second is that no matter what you do, you can’t get everyone to continue shocking victims. The third is that even if you do everything you can to make rebellion more likely, some people will still shock the subject as often as they can.

People will do things they know are wrong if told to do so by an authority figure. After the financial crisis, firms hired hourly wage employees and had them sign documents stating that homeowners were in default of their mortgage, that the bank owned the mortgage, and that the person signing had reviewed the necessary documents to know this well enough to swear to it. The people signing had not reviewed the documents and thus could not swear. They signed anyway, at a rate of about 30 seconds per signature.

As a result, people lost their homes. It was wrong, the people doing it had to know it was wrong. They did it anyway, and for very little money.

Let’s move on to our second experiment. In 1971 Phillip Zimbardo set up a mock prison and divided eighteen college students into nine prisoners and nine guards. The guards had never been prison guards, the prisoners were guilty of nothing.

The experiment was due to run two weeks. It had to be stopped in six days. As Zimbardo himself says, “our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.”

Why, specifically, did it end after 6 days?

First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.

Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.

Guilty of nothing. Put in solitary confinement, held in prison even when they begged and wept to be let go, made to push ups while someone sat on them, deprived of food, sexually humiliated, a boy sobbing unconrollably while other prisoners chant he is a bad prisoners.

And only one outsider finds anything wrong?

Something else: when the experiment ended most of the guards wished it hadn’t. Zimbardo felt the guards fell into three groups: the ones who seemed to enjoy using their authority, the ones who went by the rules the guards had agreed on, and the guards who tried to treat the prisoners well, especially when other guards weren’t around.

People don’t just do what they’re told to do, they do what they’re expected to do. We all know various roles: we know how to act like a brother, a sister, a student, a teacher, a father, a mother. We know how to act like a prisoner, a prison guard, a husband, a wife. We know how to act while on a plane, while going through pre-flight screening, while being questioned by a cop. We know how to be an employee and we know how to be a boss. We know how to do many of these things even if we’ve never done them before, because we’ve seen other people doing them, or we’ve seen it on TV or read of it or know people who have done it. And if we don’t know, then we follow the cues of the people around us, and we do what we’re told to by those in authority over us.

The findings of social psychology about compliance, rebellion and role-playing take up many books, and those books are worth reading, but let’s go back to our initial comment on human nature, that people are weak.

Weak doesn’t mean bad. If you were to take those same 9 boys who played prison guards in Zimbardo’s prison experiment, and you were to put them down in the middle of a disaster where people needed help and they could choose to help or they could choose to loot, most of them would help. If you were to give them medicine and medical training and put them amongst injured people, they would heal. We know this, too, because studies of great disasters show that people spontaneously come together and help those in trouble (which, as an aside, is why forbidding civilians from helping disaster victims is a bad idea).

Told to be prison guards, they acted like most prison guards and became brutal. Told instead to be a nurse, most would act much more kindly (though a few would abuse the power nurse’s have.)

Some people are bad. Some people are rotten. Some people will do the wrong thing whenever given the least chance. And some people are good. Some people won’t shock another person, no matter who tells them to. Some people will risk their lives to create an underground railroad for slaves or will hide Jews and Gypsies so they can’t be killed by Nazis, even at great risk to themselves. Some people will see boys being treated horribly, and will speak up even though they’re only a recent Ph.D. and the person they’re telling off is a professor.

But both the truly good, who will do the right thing if at all possible and sometimes even if not, and the truly bad, who enjoy hurting other people, are fairly rare. From reading the psychological literature I’d put each group at somewhere between five to fifteen percent of the population.

The rest of the population is weak. They do what they think they’re expected to do. They can be good, and do good, if that’s what is expected, and they can be bad, and do evil, if that’s what is expected of them. If there is a bias, I think it is slightly to the good. Most people think of themselves as good, and would rather do good. But this bias is slight, and people will do the wrong thing if it is encouraged.

And, generally speaking, when it comes to economic activity, we encourage bad behaviour.

This starts with our every-day economic ideology. Economic activity is primarily carried out by two types of organizations: governments and corporations. Our explicit ideology for corporations, which is codified in law, is that a corporations only responsibility is to maximize profit. Greed is good. We could go into a long discussion of the rise of this ideology and talk about Calvinist predestination (if God loves you he’ll make you rich) and misunderstandings of Adam Smith, as if the man who wrote an entire book on morality thought that greed was a good thing except under very limited and accidental circumstances, but the point is, this is our ruling economic ideology in the West: maximize profits.

It isn’t even, any longer, “maximize profits so long as you stay within the law.” The run up to the financial crisis saw widespread fraud, including the use of what were, at the time, called liar loans. After the crisis we saw companies hiring people to sign affidavits which would cause homeowners to lose their homes, and systematically lying on those affidavits (the so-called robosigning scandal.) Companies attested they had properly transfered ownership of mortgages when they hadn’t. Companies sold financial instruments to clients whom they had a fiduciary responsibility to while betting those instruments would fail, and in their private emails called those clients idiots.

The rule today is that you break the law if breaking the law maximizes profits and you won’t go to jail as a result. Fines are considered a cost of doing business, the legality or illegality is irrelevant.

This flows from the very top of our society. It is how our CEOs and executives think, and as our politicans and prosecutors refuse to investigate or charge those who are guilty of widespread fraud, it is clearly how our political and legal class thinks.

Authority, in other words, says that it’s all right to do illegal and immoral things in pursuit of profit.

Well, so long as you’re told to do so by someone important.

Humans are weak. They do what authority figures tell them to do, they do what their peer group values, they do what the incentives reward.

This generation of left leadership, with almost no exceptions, needs to be retired. They are almost always willing to sell out, and when not willing to, they are ineffectual twits who won’t do what’s necessary and worse, will make sure that no one else can.

So for the US, there is no “left gets its chance and IF it fails”, because the left already failed.

Also in the US there’s going to be one more (shitty) boom, based on fracking.  The US will be a post-apocalyptic wasteland when it’s over, but in the meantime, enough people will be kept employed, and thinking they might make it, to keep the game together.  How long that’ll go on, I don’t know.  Stirling Newberry thinks its good for as much as 20 years.  I think it’ll be less, just because these elites are so frickin’ incompetent.  More on that in a post soon.

The elites, if they make it impossible for the left to do their work (or if the left just fails, quite possible), will, in many cases, be signing their own death warrant.  If the neo-nazis in Greece or France take charge, be sure that they will liquidate much of the old order, the old elites.  Since those elites are, in fact, corrupt and treasonous (selling out the interests of their own countries), they will be able to do so to cheers and by simply enforcing the law.

The right’s solution won’t work, of course, but it can be made to look like it works for a few years at least.  And that it won’t work, won’t mean anything to dead oligarchs.

The elites aren’t going to keep getting financial oligarchy, where they force the government to borrow money from them, pay it back with interest and sell off the crown jewels at fire-sale prices.  That game is NOT going to continue for much longer, in the grand scheme of things (at least not in Europe, the US is a different matter).

If they want to save their own necks, and yes, it will come to that, they’d best cut a deal now.  The longer they wait, the worse the deal is going to get for them.

Of course, some part of the elites will make a deal, and will survive.  But some won’t.

As for the left, remember that the rich are, as a class, your enemies.  Treat them as such, or they will make sure you fail.

This is not just an issue with the US.  During the G20 up here in Toronto the Ontario government used a SECRET LAW to strip civil liberties from anyone in the downtown Toronto core.  Of course, it must be said that the public couldn’t give a shit, it was not an issue in the next election.

In Britain, after the riots, family members of those convicted of crimes were evicted from public housing.  Collective punishment of family members is unjust

And, in most countries today, the rich and powerful are not even charged with crimes that their “lessers” regularly do jail time for.

It is done.  It is over.  The US is not a nation of laws, it is a nation of men, and the law does not treat everyone equally.  You do not even have the right to a trial before punishment, to see the evidence against you or to face your accusers.  And virtually every other nation in the so-called developed world is walking down the same road.

When the revolution comes, if it comes, the first job is going to have to be to destroy all of this stuff, and to inculcate a visceral understanding that this and all types of constant surveillance are, simply, the hallmarks of evil regimes.

Of course, in time, the descendants of the revolution will forget.  The hallmark of evil regimes for our forefathers was torture, after all.

The individual mandate is lousy policy.  It always was.  It is especially lousy policy without a large (100 million +) public option.  The health care plan is, for all intents and purposes, a 90′s Heritage plan.

This?  This is what progressives want to fight for?

BMaz has a good article up on whether the bill is Constitutional.  Me, I don’t know if it’s Constitutional.  But what I do know is that if I were a conservative Justice, I’d want to just strike down the individual mandate and leave the rest in place, because I would laugh myself sick every night watching Obama have to kill the bill himself, getting rid of guaranteed issue, community ratings, and so on.  Because Obama would have to, and would.  He made a deal with the health insurance companies.  In exchange for some concessions, what they received in exchange was every American being forced to buy their shitty product.  And while Obama doesn’t keep promises to left wingers, he does keep promises to people like the CEOs of health insurance companies.

Still, watching “progressives” defending the individual mandate is just another reminder of why I don’t call myself a progressive.

Go and die on a hill, for forcing Americans to buy shitty insurance from evil companies which aren’t properly regulated.

I’ll just sit here on the sidelines laughing myself sick.  With progressives like these, who needs right wingers?

Mulcair was the front runner, and his victory was hardly a surprise.  Many NDPers thought that he would move to the center and would abandon left-wing principles in pursuit of power, and a number of key members of the prior leader’s team have left.

I had my doubts, but Mulcair has gone a long way to assuage them in just a week.  First, this, in his first day in Parliament:

Speaking to reporters afterward, he laid out his concerns for the state of the Canadian economy and accused the federal government of neglecting workers as it promotes the extraction of natural resources, mainly in Western Canada.

“That’s driven up the value of the Canadian dollar, made it more difficult to export our own goods. We’re killing our manufacturing sector,” he said. “The way the Conservatives are acting has had a devastating impact on good jobs with pensions.”

There was a lot of whining from Alberta about this statement, but it’s just a fact.  The classic Canadian economy was a mixed one, which combined resource extraction and manufacturing.  When manufacturing does well, resources generally don’t.  When resources do, manufacturing doesn’t.  In the old model this was considered a strength, since it meant that part of the economy was doing well, no matter what resource prices were.  And when one sector was up, it was meant to subsidize the other sector.

Resource booms always end.  Every single one.  The oil boom will end, the question is when.  If Canada doesn’t have a manufacturing sector left when the boom ends, we will become a basket case South American country.  And Alberta will become the new Maritimes (remember, the Maritimes was originally a resource boom area.)

Politically speaking, this is also smart, because the NDP just isn’t going to get a lot of MPS out of Alberta in specific or the Prairies in general.  If attacking the tar sands, and calling for Canada to add value to resources before shipping them out of the country costs votes there, so be it.  The battleground is not Alberta.  Alberta went all in with the Conservatives, and they have to live with that.  There’s no point in pandering to Albertans, it would take a huge shift in voting to gain many more seats.

The places in play are the Maritimes and Ontario, and it is there that the election will be won or lost.  It is Ontario which has been losing its manufacturing due to the high dollar, and the Maritimes has been treated shoddily by the Conservatives as well.  So on both politics and economics Mulcair’s stance is a good one, which appeals to the regions where the NDP can make gains and pisses of people who would never vote NDP anyway.

Then there was this, yesterday, when the Tory austerity budget was unveiled:

“The Conservatives have caused the problem by gutting the fiscal capacity of the government,” Thomas Mulcair, the newly crowned NDP leader, said Wednesday.

“Now they’re saying, oh, gee whiz, no more fiscal capacity in the government, we know what we’ll do, we’ll start cutting the services of the government.”

Oh my, pointing out the obvious.  Conservative tax cuts and reckless spending caused the defict.  But tax cuts for rich people are sacrosanct, so old folks will have to wait till 67 to retire.

And this:

“Everything indicates the Conservative budget will be synonymous with cutbacks and job losses. A few months ago, the Prime Minister promised textually, in this House, that he would not touch pensions, would not cut health transfers to the provinces, would not touch services to the population?” Mr. Mulcair said. “Will the Prime Minister live up to his word, or will he break his promise?”

And then, Harper cut pensions and cut health transfer to the provinces.

Ouch.  That had to smart.

Yeah, I’m liking Mulcair.

One of the things which has distressed me most about the West is that no one on the left has really been willing to hammer the politics of class.  Mulcair, who has also hit inequality, shows some signs of doing so.  It is conventional wisdom that tax increases won’t fly, but the polling data doesn’t support that, at least not if you want to tax the rich and make that clear.  Heck, if even Globe and Mail readers (the primary business newspaper in Canada) want tax increases and more spending, I think we can conclude that it’ll fly (yes, I’m aware of the limitations of that particular poll).  But even the upper middle and lower upper class think that the true rich should pay their share.  Coming out of Quebec, which is somewhat insulated from the political culture of the rest of North America, Mulcair seems willing to play class politics, and seems to know how to do so.

So far, so good.  And as for the budget, Prime Minister Harper isn’t going to get the cuts he wants from the public service without causing great pain.  Nor is cutting other forms of spending going to help the economy.  Harper better get down on his knees and pray to God that there isn’t a major downturn in China, because he’s betting everything on resource prices.  If they crumble, the Canadian economy will go with them.  And so will Harper’s job.

This is opposition politics 101: whatever the government does, you oppose. If Harper’s bet on the resource economy works, then the Conservatives will get another term.  If it doesn’t, the NDP needs to be seen as the party which opposed his policies.  Mulcair is positioning them for that, and doing so in a way which allow him, if he gets in power, to put in place policies which will reward the constituencies he needs to win—everyone not attached to the oil teat.

Photo by Chris Hondros, RIP

I think we all remember the year before the Iraq war, the drumbeat of propaganda, the horrible certainty that nothing we could do would stop George Bush’s messianic belief that he must have a war with Iraq because he was ordained by God, and all the great presidents were war presidents. We argued at the time that there is no decision a politician can make which he or she should think on harder than going to war.

The reason should be obvious. In war bad things happen. Wars are always sold as if they are going to be brief, as if only the “bad guys” will be killed, as if “precision munitions” have made horrors a thing of the past. They are sold as easy, and glorious. And they almost never are. War is the archetype of “rubber hits the road”, of a situation you can’t control. They have a way of turning into messes we never intended.

World War I was supposed to be brief. So was the Iraq war. A quick march in, lots of flowers, rework Iraq into a libertarian paradise by applying Republican economic and social dogma, then on to Tehran!

We could run through the numbers of dead, of maimed, of orphaned, but I think this story from the San Antonio Express-News speaks more directly to what happens in war. Some time ago some US soldiers raped an Iraqi girl repeatedly, then tried to conceal the crime by burning the corpse and killing her family.

Iraqis were outraged, and later some soldiers were captured. And for four months they were tortured. The antiseptic language in the article is somehow worse than saying it outright: “foot bones detached from commingled remains of Fouty and Jimenez, and finger bones wrapped in a blanket. Part of a pair of handcuffs was found.” And a broken nose that had healed.

The men were kept alive, in other words, and tortured. They were probably cut up while still alive.

You can’t control war. Even the best disciplined army in the world (and the American is not even close to being that) will kill people it shouldn’t. Rapes will occur, they do in every war. Brutality and torture are almost certain to occur, even if the army tries to avoid it, rather than institutionalizing it. War, by its nature, requires making the enemy into something less than human, so you don’t mind shooting them. It almost always spills over onto the locals, who likewise are viewed as animals by occupiers or invaders and treated as such by many of them.

War, then, is hell. This isn’t news, everyone knows it. But as with most of what everyone “knows” they don’t really get it, because most people don’t get things that have never effected them or people they love. And if you’re in Congress, well, with very few exceptions, no one you care about is going to fight, no one you know is going to risk their life and maybe even get captured and tortured. The same is true of most people serving in the administration.

That boy being tortured, that girl being raped. All the deaths, murder, rapes, torture, were inevitable. You go to war with the army you have, and the president you have, but even if Jimmy Carter had been in charge there would have been murder, rapes, torture—just less of them. But “less” doesn’t matter much when it’s your daughter who was raped repeatedly at gunpoint; your son who was cut into pieces over a period of months.

And so we come back to the heart of the war. We rarely talk about it anymore, but it’s simple enough. All those people who supported the war, and most especially all those who voted for it, bear the moral responsibility for the results of the war. At least 100,000 dead Iraqis (and probably closer to a million). 4,000 and rising dead US soldiers. Rape. Murder. Torture. Orphans who got to watch their parents being killed. Husbands who saw their wives die, or wives who watched their husbands gunned down or blown into bloody carrion. Families who have buried multiple children.

All because members of Congress didn’t care and because they were gutless. Because they though to themselves “I might have to face attack ads if I vote against this war.” Can you think of anything more weak, anything more pathetically evil, than to care more about your reelection than about thousands dying? Than about the certainty that from your vote will come rape and torture and murder?

And can you think of anything more pathetic, more redolent of bad judgment than to say “but I didn’t know. I trusted George Bush?”

As far as I am concerned most of Congress doesn’t just have blood on their hands, they are in it up to their chins. Their gutlessness, cupidity and selfishness is such that most of them, in a just world, would be preparing their defenses for a Nuremburg trial. They attacked a country which had not attacked the US, based on lies that were debunked at the time, for petty personal reasons of political ambition or cowardice.

We all know that won’t happen, but what I will tell you is this. Without the Iraq war, the financial crisis happening right now either wouldn’t be, or would be much less harsh. It is quite likely that Iraq is the last mistake of the American century and marks the end of America as a superpower.

This is only fitting. Those who have proven they cannot be trusted with power must have that power taken away. America had its chance, in 2004, to take that power away from the worst of its elites. It didn’t. For an outsider, whether the election was stolen in 2004 or not is irrelevant, all that matters was the lesson of the result—that Americans are no longer capable of disciplining their own elites.

American hegemony rose out of the ashes of WWII. World War II was an unprovoked war. Germany attacked those that did not threaten it. At Nuremburg Americans hung Nazis who had not been involved in the Holocaust, for no crime other than unprovoked war, declaring that it was a capital offense. Out of that war, and out of Nuremburg, America was born as the leader of the free world. Not just the mightiest, but the nation that said “never again”.

It is fitting then that an unprovoked war is what is bringing an end to America’s leadership of the free world, to its economic and military hegemony. Having done what it once condemned, having proven unwilling or unable to correct itself, America has reaped what it sowed.

Alas that a young man had to be chopped into bits; a young girl raped repeatedly, as part of the process—that hundreds of thousands had to be killed.

It is in blood that empires, like humans, are born.

It is in blood that they die.

(Originally posted October 5th, 2008)

I think that Michael Brenner’a appraisal of Stratfor themselves, that they’re a immature, unprofessional and hustlers is true.  The incredulity, reading them, is “people pay for this?”

Which leads to the question of how much of worth there is in the files.  The main problem isn’t whether the files are really from Stratfor, I believe they are, the problem is that Stratfor seems somewhat clueless.  So, for example, if true, that Russia and Israel sold out those who bought military equipment from them is fascinating and important:

According to the leaked document, Israel gave Russia the “data link codes” for unmanned aerial vehicles that the Jewish state sold to Georgia, and in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Tor-M1 missile defense systems that Russia sold Iran.

I’m inclined to believe it, but really, who knows.  I should add that countries who are serious about their defence, really should make their own equipment if they can.