GEOPOLITICAL STRATEGIES

Liberal's Deficit in a Sense of Reality

By Con George-Kotzabasis

Jane Mayer and the reviewer of her book Andrew Bacevich both of them have an unfathomable deficit of a sense of reality and are oblivious of the lessons of history. Like beatific angels they descend from “a fine cloud of solicitous idealism” to critique and accuse the Bush administration of American-made Gulags. Disregarding and forgetting that the normal and complacent days of America ended on 9/11. On this fateful day America was attacked by an invisible deadly enemy whose only transparency was that he was wearing civilian clothes. In such circumstances the Administration was in the morally unenviable position to apprehend people not on hard legal evidence but on suspicion and to hold them for a long period because of the possible great danger. In the darkness of this war against global terror the enlightened civilized processes of the Geneva Conventions and due process became totally obsolete, not by the nefarious practices of the government but by the dicta of reality and history. On the latter criteria, Mayer and Bacevich are irredeemable failures. To quote the great Austrian writer Robert Musil, “to the mind good and evil… are not sceptical, relative concepts, but terms of function, values that depend on the context (M.E.) they find themselves in.”

Further, desperate to make their case against the Administration they throw the latter into the pool of the politics of fear. They are deliberately not making the nuanced distinction between the words threat and fear. While one can threaten even the fearless it does not follow that the threatened reacts out of fear. He merely reacts to a plausible threat like any reasonable person would in the same circumstances. And this is exactly what Americans are doing in the aftermath of 9/11. To claim as Mayer and Bacevich do that the Bush administration deliberately let loose the winds of fear to batter Americans for their own nefarious ends, whatever the latter happen to be, is on their part legerdemain par excellence.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now.

Social Engineering is the Devil in the Detail of the Collapse of Wall Street

By Con George-Kotzabasis

This is the time for all the intellectual Lilliputians to raise their head. Before our two authors send to the gallows Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek, they ought to be reminded of some facts. The dragon teeth that mauled the only system, i.e., capitalism that brought relative prosperity to the peoples of the world were spawned by government intervention in the first place. Roosevelt’s creation of the publicly funded Fannie Mae, and many years after its twin Freddie Mac, followed by the Community Reinvestment Act, under Jimmy Carter, and which was resurrected by Bill Clinton, were all the offspring of government intervention. They were the putty in the frame of social engineering by which all Americans would have realized their dream, to have and own their own homes.

Clinton's decision in 1999 put pressure on lenders to "widen the pool of home borrowers." New York Times article on September 1999 stated: "In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans...encourage banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good...Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring." (The Australian, October 20, 2008) Latinos and African Americans are the biggest minorities and the more numerous mortgage defaulters in the US housing market. Fannie and Freddie were providing the easy loans and the ...Reinvestment Act were enforcing bankers to render their credit services to all and sundry irrespective of the financial position of the borrowers. (Barack Obama as community organizer was the 'Enforcer' as he was threatening banks with prosecution if they did not take riskier lending practices with non-credit worthy customers.) And the whole saga of the sub-prime loans was resting on these rotten foundations created by Democratic administrations. The profligacy of 'ghetto' loans in astronomical digits was replacing Gekko greed.

Hence Wall Street collapsed through the derivatives market multiplier leveraging founded on the subprime loans by which the moguls of finance made for a while their ephemeral profits. And this collapse released the nightmare that was always embedded in the dream of mass home ownership when it became evident that many ordinary Americans were not only going to lose their homes but also their jobs all by the grace of government intervention and its blessing of easy loans. Easy come easy go.

Your opinion...

Obama not the Man to Lead a Great Nation

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Washington Post columnist Krauthammer's stethoscope detects the "jarring" beats of Obama's 'unwavering' liberal democratic heart. A "uniter" in words, a "disuniter" in practice. On Iraq, not only he 'denigrated the surge' as a Democrat, but by saying, which is laughable, 'that the Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda and joined us because of the Democratic victory in the...midterm elections,' Obama removed the "crown" from the head of the American troops, who were the true facilitators of making the Sunnis to join the US against al Qaeda under the new and imaginative leadership of General Petraeus, and attempted to place it on the empty heads of the Democrats. Obama is hardly the man to be the president of a great nation (speaking as an Australian) facing maliciously fiendish and implacable enemies.

Over to you

Biden "Certainly" Won against Palin but at the Expense of Losing the War

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia are craven to the end. They are calling for ‘ending the war’ in Iraq but not for winning it. This was the call that Biden was proudly flagging in his debate with Palin. So their "ending" will have the outcome of depriving their brave troops from a military victory that is at the threshold and bring them home with the shame of defeat hanging over them. Abjectly ignorant of the strategic repercussions of even a perceived defeat will have upon the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, as pledged by Obama and Biden, that will make this war even more difficult to win as it will embolden the Islamist fanatics to fight even harder against US troops and their allies in Afghanistan thus foreshadowing a second greater defeat for America thanks to an irresolute strategically thoughtless future -God forbid-Obama administration.

The Democrats and their spiritual supporters, the nipple-fed intellectuals, are like children playing with war toys. By being fickle and flippant about US foreign policy they will be sacrificing the paramount interests of America and its allies at a time when Western civilization with its huge economic difficulties is assailed by implacable fanatic and deadly enemies and its only protector, the USA, is being enervated further, beyond its present harrowing economic state, by a future weak political leadership and an effete and diplomatically and militarily naive "consiglieri".

Your opinion...

Will America Rise from its 'Comatose' State?

By Con George-Kotzabasis

A reply to a very clever American Open Salon

The Global Credit Crunch and the Crisis of Legitimacy

By RCMoya612

RCMoya, after your excellent and resplendent analysis I feel, if I captiously quibble about few points, like a bat squeaking in the dark. First, inequality might have “continued its forward march” but I would argue that it did so on a higher level of general economic prosperity in America following the up till now unassailable historical paradigm of capitalism and free markets that has made the poor ‘richer’ in relative terms, as Amartya Sen has contended.

Secondly, America’s “hectoring and ignoring” has its counterpart in Europe and in other continents whose countries were strong allies of the US during the Cold War but with the collapse of the Soviet Union have reappropriated their independence both geopolitically and culturally and expressing this in their own hectoring and ignoring against America, thus continuing the irreversible law of the political and cultural competition of nation-states.

Thirdly, I would argue that as long as America continues to be the centripetal force attracting the “best and the brightest” to its shores and not stifling the Schumpeterian spirit of entrepreneurship and “creative destruction”, it will be able to rise again even from the ashes of a 'comatose' state and will continue to be  in the foreseeable future the paramount power in world affairs.

And fourthly, the rejection by Congress of the funding plan that would have a better chance than none to prevent the economy from collapsing was inevitable in the present political climate where reason cannot compete with populist emotionalism and when a swirl of weak politicians, like Nancy Pelosi, and, indeed, Barak Obama, are its ‘slaves’.  Only by cleaning out these wimpish politicians from positions of power will the political narrative reassert its legitimacy.