What 'free market'?

It has become a key aspect of liberal dogma that deregulation and the "free market" are to blame for the collapse of the global economy. But blaming laissez-faire for the world's economic malaise is a lot like blaming U.S. "isolationism" for 9/11: it ignores years of government interventions -- like bailouts, cheap credit from the central bank and overseas military campaigns -- that contradict the ideologically convenient retellings of history preferred by those eager to cast every crisis as the fault of anyone but the state and the political establishment.

Claiming that a non-existent free market is what got us to where we are today is to pretend that the Bush administration was in good faith, if naively, pursuing a hands-off approach to the economy -- in essence, arguing that if they were guilty of anything, it was being too ideologically committed to allowing people to exchange goods and services with minimal state intervention. But if anything, the Bush administration modeled its economic policy more off Mussolini than Adam Smith, actively expanding state power to enrich its corporate cohorts through the type of crony capitalism best embodied by quasi-private firms like Halliburton and Goldman Sachs.

As economist Dean Baker writes on his blog for The American Prospect:

The media are busy perpetuating a myth that the United States has been a beacon of "free market" capitalism. This is a lie. The United States never had free market capitalism and certainly the system in place over the last three decades hardly qualifies.

The U.S. put in place policies designed to transfer income from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. This is most evident now with the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent bailing out the banks. For the last three decades, the banks and their top executives, made vast fortunes using a free government insurance policy called "too big to fail," under which bond holders and other creditors could lend money to the banks knowing that the government would honor their debts if they ever got into trouble.

It is an outright lie to call this a "free market." This is a huge government handout. This insurance policy is enormously valuable and the banks did not have to pay a penny for it. The banks are ardent opponents of free market capitalism. None of them have advocated that they be allowed to collapse.

Recently, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan -- conscious of his fall from "economic genius" in the 1990s to Man Most Responsible for Our Economic Demise now -- has taken to blaming the menace of Asian savings for the economic collapse. In an op/ed for The Wall Street Journal, "Great Depression II: No Really, It's Not My Fault", Greenspan blames the "free market" as well as the Chinese for the world's problems, the latter for simply saving too much money -- the commie bastards -- and then injecting it into our economy. This caused the U.S. housing bubble, Greenspan argues, rather than, say, the central bank's dramatic expansion of the money supply under his stewardship during the artificial boom of the last decade.

Back in 2007, however, Greenspan conceded in a revealing interview with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart -- a journalist masquerading as a comedian, as opposed to the usual other way around -- that insofar as there exists a government institution with the monopoly power to literally create money out of thin air, which it can then dole out to a politically connected elite in the financial sector, then there is not a free market.

More importantly, Greenspan admits that after more than four decades of experience in the economic forecasting "profession", loosely defined, he still has no better understanding of market forces than he did when he started out -- and neither does any other would-be central planner. Now that the full brunt of the policies he pursued has been realized, however, Greenspan is quick to argue that a free market existed, and that, if anything, people like him were guilty of just not intervening in the market forcibly enough. One should take the more recent explanation as the last attempt at legacy-saving that it is.

Whatever one's views on whether a genuine free market -- which would include an abolishment of "intellectual property" and corporate personhood, a repeal of restrictions on organized labor such as Taft-Hartley, and other aspects of laissez-faire curiously absent from the propaganda of many supposed free-marketeers -- that central planning can never adequately substitute for the distributed, decentralized knowledge of human society should weigh heavily on those willing to trust the likes of the Greenspans and Geithners with constructing a more enlightened and sustainable economic policy.

When it rains, it pours

The conflict between Russia and Georgia -- besides killing a good number of innocent people and possibly enabling a new fraudulent "cold war", to the delight of defense contractors everywhere -- provoked a stunning amount of hypocrisy from U.S. officials. Consider Condoleeza Rice, speaking to to reporters on Monday:

"Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool that it has always used whenever it wishes to deliver a message and that's its military power," Rice told reporters en route to an emergency meeting of NATO foreign ministers set for Tuesday. "That's not the way to deal in the 21st century."

This from a woman who sold a war on an impoverished country on the other side of the globe on the basis that maybe -- contrary to evidence available at the time -- Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was preparing to maybe, just maybe, nuke an American city? Hypocrisy truly knows no bounds among those in the upper echelons of power. As Salon's Glenn Greenwald writes: 

Whatever one's views are on the justifiability of each isolated instance, it's simply a fact that the U.S. invades, bombs, occupies, and interferes in the internal affairs of other countries far more than any other country on the planet. It's not even a close competition.

Just during the time Rice has served in the Bush administration, we bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan; did the same to Iraq; repeatedly bombed Somalia, killing all sorts of civilians; fed bombs to Israel as they invaded and bombed Lebanon; top political officials (led by John McCain and Joe Lieberman) have repeatedly threatened, and advocated, that the same be done to a whole host of other countries, including Iran and Syria. That's to say nothing of the virtually countless interventions and bombings in the pre-Bush, "peacetime" years -- from the Balkans and Panama to Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and on and on and on.

But, as Greenwald notes, war isn't loved just by those in the White House, but by the elite media as well:

The most enduring and predominant rule of American politics is that every national politician must demonstrate their willingness, even eagerness, to start wars. On the day in 1989 that the first George Bush ordered the deadly U.S. invasion of Panama, The New York Times' R.W. Apple approvingly wrote on the front page that starting wars like that was "a Presidential initiation rite," and that "most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest." Thus, proclaimed Apple, Bush's attack on Panama was an example of his "showing his steel" and "has shown him as a man capable of bold action."

Read the rest.

Gravel off to Gitmo?

Self-proclaimed terrorism expert Steve Emerson -- a well noted plagiarist, fear monger, and Islamophobe -- is fulfilling his latest desperate attempt for media attention by claiming that former Senator Mike Gravel advocated "stalking" Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg at a recent event that I covered for Inter Press Service.

Here is what Gravel said at the event -- which was aimed at raising awareness of the case of imprisoned Palestinian activist Sami al-Arian -- that has so angered Emerson, as dutifully noted by Fox News:

“Find out where he lives, find out where his kids go to school, find out where his office is, picket him all the time,” Gravel said, in an audio tape obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism and provided to FOX News.

“Call him a racist in signs if you see him. Call him an injustice. Call him whatever you want to call him, but in his face all the time.”

---------

“How do you deal with this kind of an injustice? I wouldn’t protest. I don’t believe in protesting. I think it demonstrates the failure of representative government. My answer to that problem is, I want to empower you as a lawmaker. … Don’t rely on your elected officials,” the former senator said.

Oh no! An elderly former lawmaker is urging people to protest the very government officials whose salaries they pay. And he's not all that sold on representative democracy -- get this man to the loony bin!

As I heard it, Gravel was calling people to picket a public official who -- albeit in his characteristically blunt manner. It also happened to be not so great advice, and not something I'd recommend people follow if they're really concerned about al-Arian's case (at least stick to picketing at the guy's workplace). That said, laughable is the notion that a 78 year old former senator would somehow be able to convince a bunch of generally well dressed middle-aged activists and writers such as Naomi Klein, assembled at a restaurant/bookshop in an increasingly yuppified part of Washington, to rise up and -- what? Yell mean things at a federal prosecutor?

Emerson, as usual, sees a threat:

“The question is whether he crossed the line in saying ‘find out where his kids go to school,’” said counter-terrorism expert Steve Emerson. “That to my mind and to government officials including those in the FBI crosses the line into a direct veiled threat."

As for inciting violence -- isn't that what Emerson's career has been all about? This, after all, is a man who has never found a crime he couldn't somehow blame on "radical Islamists" -- including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings.

But the next quote is the real whopper:

[Emerson] said the evidence at the Al-Arian trial “overwhelming showed and incontrovertibly demonstrated that he was head of the Islamic Jihad network in the United States.”

Not to be pedantic, but the definition I get for "incontrovertible" is "not open to question -- indisputable", and well, a Florida jury plainly disagreed with Emerson's assesment. In fact, even after former attorney general John Ashcroft declared that al-Arian was one of the most evil, dangerous terrorists living among us -- just over a month before the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq -- a Florida jury in 2005 failed to convict to convict the outspoken Palestinian activist of a single crime, acquitting him of eight charges and deadlocking on another nine (with 9 to 10 jurors voting to acquit on every charge).

But I suspect that Emerson probably agrees with what one of the jurors who did not vote to acquit on all charges told Meg Laughlin of the St. Petersburg Times:

"Like another person on the jury, I was convinced Mr. Al-Arian was still working with the [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] after it was illegal. He was a very smart man and knew how not to be obvious. For me, the absence of evidence didn't mean there was no evidence."

But hey, who can blame Emerson for always trying to scare people? After all, professional fear merchants like him have made a killing by finding terror under every pillow, especially since 9/11. And unfortunately, tabloid outlets like Fox News and CNN will always be eager to bring people like him on TV to discuss how your dark-skinned neighbor just may be trying to kill you.

Just remember: be afraid!

Kill your television

The New York Times reports:

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television “with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad.” He said CBS correspondents can “get in there very quickly when a story merits it.”

If you haven't already done so, disconnect your cable or satellite feed and save yourself from exposure to the criminally asinine celebrity gossip coverage that passes for television "news". Granted, you may not be as up to date on Britney Spears' most recent meltdown or Jessica Simpson's latest hookup as your friends, but you just might gain back your sanity.

As CBS correspondent Lara Logan is quoted as saying in the NYT article: “If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts.”

Instead of absorbing corporate media disinformation, support actual journalism -- links are conveniently provided to your right.

You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Another "surge" in Iraq

Pleased with their success in spinning a failed troop escalation in Iraq as a successful "surge", Pentagon officials will be announcing another such "surge" this week. But as this poorly written press release announcing a news conference at the National Press Club makes clear, this time the military's press shop will be heralding Iraq's apparently vibrant economy:

Iraq's Economic Surge
Iraqi Minister of Industry, Fawzi Hariri and U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Business Transformation and Director of the Task Force for Business and StabilityOperations, Paul Brinkley will announce and discuss a number of new contracts for private industry for business development in Iraq.

They will discuss the economic environment in Iraq and the positive impact that the recent and growing economic surge is having in Iraq and need to economic opportunity as it relates to long term security [sic]. They will outline the ongoing economic surge and business opportunities being developed in Iraq.

Of course, like tales of underreported "progress", this isn't the first time the "surge" in Iraq's economy has cited by the U.S. government. From a State Department press release in March 2007:

Washington -- An “economic surge” is accompanying the ongoing U.S. troop surge in Iraq, and the country could see results from this increased activity within a few months, a senior U.S. diplomat said March 9 in Baghdad.

“My focus is on now, and on what's going to happen in this period of surge, not only military surge, but also economic surge over the next four to six months,” Ambassador Timothy Carney, coordinator for economic transition in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters in a two-way teleconference.

Results from this increased economic activity should become apparent “within a relatively short time – I’m talking about a few months,” Carney said.

So what is there to make of the U.S. government's boast of "increased economic activity" and a rebounding economy? Certainly the war has been good for makers of coffins and body bags, but it would be hard to find any major industries that have benefited from the invasion. When it comes down to it, to what can supporters of the war point when discussing Iraq's surging fortunes? Oh:

BAGHDAD, Iraq: Iraq on Monday signed two deals worth US$5 billion (€3.23 billion) to buy 40 planes from Boeing and 10 planes from Canada's Bombardier to upgrade Iraqi Airways' aging fleet.

The deals were signed by Finance Minister Bayan Jabr in a ceremony attended by Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as well as U.S., British and Canadian diplomats.

--------

Al-Maliki said the government was working to improve the country and called for investments in Iraq.

"Today, the process of developing economy has started," al-Maliki said in a speech during the ceremony.

Boeing, the Seattle-based defense contractor, saw first quarter profits rise 38% this year. While peaceful, productive enterprises will always be harmed by military conflict, war is certainly good for those with the right political connections.