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| "Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it." - H L Mencken |
DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KOREA [DPRK] rejects UN sanctions as war ghosts are conjured DPRK<ContinueReadingClick
artof12.blogspot THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF NORTH KOREA [DPRK]<ContinueReadingClick
The resolution passed by the UN Security Council on Friday is the fifth of its kind since 2006, when the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted its first nuclear test. Adopted in response to the third detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea, it aims to tighten financial restrictions and cargo inspections against Pyongyang.
Responding to the move, the North said in a statement by a Foreign Ministry spokesman: "The DPRK, as it did in the past, vehemently denounces and totally rejects the 'resolution on sanctions' against the DPRK, a product of the US hostile policy toward it."
"The world will clearly see what permanent position the DPRK will reinforce as a nuclear weapons state and satellite launcher as a result of the US attitude of prodding the UNSC into cooking up the 'resolution’," Pyongyang said.
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US Faces Unrelenting Strategy ATimes<ContinueReadingClick
*NOTE: HEXAGRAM #36, "... a series of events that took place during the reign of the Emperor Jou (1154-1122 BC), the last emperor of the Shang Dynasty (1766-1121 BC). It is also a story of how KOREA began its history as a nation." [I CHING, THE BOOK OF CHANGES AND THE UNCHANGING TRUTH, BY HUA-CHING NI] * Roberta Kelly
INTERVIEW ATimes Business As Usual Behind The Slaughter By Lars Schall<ContinueReadingClick
"... LS: In this exclusive interview for Asia Times Online, the economist Guido Preparata reviews how in the first half of the 20th century Anglo-American policy was designed from the beginning to eliminate Germany as an obstacle to Western domination aspirations. The result: a division of Eurasia along a specific major fault line. Preparata also talks about critical aspects of the current state of affairs in global finance, economics, and politics. He says: "It is the quest for power that drives history, not economics."
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"... GP: I fundamentally disagree with this interpretative approach, which is, de facto, the standard leftist, anti - corporate reading of history. Again: it is power that moves history, not economics. And it has been like this at least since the era of the crusades: as explained by Germany's once celebrated Institutionalist school, joint stock companies were invented and incorporated by the Venetians to provide the expeditionary corps with the necessary supplies and logistical provisions. Corporations/banks are indeed essential auxiliaries, but auxiliaries nonetheless.
.. LS: Which function plays the "free press" in this?
.. GP: Essential, as known: it fashions the scripts that will predispose the crowds to align themselves according to an established set of grooves in view of whatever power-play is about to unfold. How the scripts are crafted and how the crowds react to them are themes (eg, the nature of propaganda) linked to the great sociological mystery of "public opinion": tough phenomenological material, not for the faint of heart - something we might discuss on a future occasion.
.. GP: None of these things. Fascism's corporativismo was something altogether different - the corporazioni were state-mandated guilds; it's another story, entirely. What we have in the US, instead, is a system governed by an ever-more oligarchically diseased, and outwardly aggressive, bureau-technocracy, which, internally, presides over a gradual privatization of public functions, a sweeping commercialization of all spiritual endeavors (higher learning and the arts), and a virtual monopolization (corporatization) of all economic activity. The combined impact of this insectifying / privatizing / monopolizing devolution has so indentured and enfeebled the nation's middle-class as to have transformed American society into a pervasively barbarized termitary with the highest crime, brutality, and incarceration rates of the post-industrialized world.
.. LS: Why do you think the US and the West are on this path?
.. GP: It's a million dollar question - you are asking me about cosmic evolution. The superficial answer is that 10 years after the demise of the Soviet Union and in the face of a major geopolitical gridlock, the usual Anglo-American strategic centrals needed a jolt to re-deploy, re-tune, re-launch in grand style the conquest of the world, and what more obvious gambit than planting the red, white and blue banner smack into the omphalos of the landmass itself, Afghanistan? I mean, it's Kipling's Great Game all over again.
.. The deeper, cosmic answer is that I do not know. All I know is that after 9/11, psychically speaking, I have witnessed a dramatic transformation. True, the seeds were there, had one looked more carefully, but the shift was nonetheless astounding, especially to my (more objective) outsider's eyes. It really made me feel as though I were in Ionesco's play Rhinoceros: all of sudden, everybody around me began to grow a horn on the snout. But maybe the horn had been there all along; or maybe it was I who then morphed into a rhino ...
"... One of the prominent cultural (viz devotional) derivatives of such a disquieting process is a now ominous and televised worship of violence in all its forms - eg, from the grotesque realm of wrestling and the downright savagery of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to slasher/dismemberment horror (the Saw saga), an avalanche of porn of the most degrading forms channeled inter alia by GM and AT&T, and the glorification of industrialized holocaust as well as a crass pulp-mythologizing of ancient Sparta or Imperial Rome cut for semi -illiterate audiences. In its main outlines, America's present socio-economic and cultural model is to be analyzed in depth so as to prevent its adoption by, and diffusion to, the rest of the world....
.. LS: One critical aspect of the wars that we experience is to me that bankers are at the top of the list of beneficiaries of wars (or the "rackett" that Smedley Butler was talking about) - insofar for example:
"The US Federal Reserve creates money to fund the war and lends it to the American government. The American government in turn must pay interest on the money they borrow from the Central Bank to fund the war. The greater the war appropriations, the greater the profits are for bankers." [9]
Isn't it therefore reasonable to expect much more of that business model going forward?
.. GP: What was happening to the collective psyche of the West under the aggressive leadership of the USA filled me with revulsion. And thus I drafted Conjuring Hitler also as an anti-war, anti-imperialist treatise. I somehow thought that if we debunked one by one the most militant myths of Liberal imperialism - the sudden and allegedly inexplicable rise to power of Hitler being the chief one - one could pull the wool off people's eyes and fashion thereby, and gradually, a clime of informed dissent against the terrible mayhem of this "War on Terror".... So, in a sense we are in an Orwellian scenario once again. Possibly, we have never abandoned it. What is certain is that in this pornographic power-play, we, the Westerners, are the most obscene thespians of all - and this is because, if we so wished, we would have the wealth and the means to bring Eden to this planet. But, apparently, we do not wish it. And if that is really the case, maybe we do not deserve this earth after all ....
.. From Gavrilo Princip (the Black Hand in Sarajevo) to these bogus Islamists by way of, say, the Montoneros in Argentina, the RAF in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy, all of them are useful idiots, by definition. The terrorist's psycho-sociological typology is fairly consistent across time and space: s/he generally is of low middle-class/upper proletarian status, very young (well below 30), not particularly intelligent, and death-prone. S/he is by definition, again, an expendable: or, more specifically a manipulable mediocrity. These useful idiots may come at certain junctures to play a critical role, of course. Terrorism is (elite) politics, never the weapon of the voiceless, but the very opposite.
.. LS: Was the reason for the First World War basically a trap laid by the British and Russian elites - and the German leadership was stupid enough to step into that trap?
.. GP: A siege, yes, a mouse-trap.
.. Discursively - I mean propaganda-wise - Keynesianism is (or used to be) the sort of grand shibboleth that is systematically used and leveraged whenever the speaker needs to strike the Liberal pose. In other words, when you wish to appear as the sober, reasonable, competent, sharp and compassionate moderate, you begin to envelop yourself in Keynesian verbigeration:
you start with, "as a Keynesian, I should say that ...", and then - to impress upon the audience a comforting image of your expert and humane "knowledge" - you go on dropping around abstruse nonsense such as "the liquidity trap" and/or "the investment multiplier" and the incontournable "deficit spending"."
.. As for Keynes the man, from what we know, he seems to have cut a pretty despicable figure: arrogant, racist, a shameless thief of other people's ideas, an exploiter of the underclass (for male prostitutes), and a speculator. But more to the point, as a theorist, he was a total nullity: he is the dottore of the commedia dell'arte, the pedantic character who knows everything without understanding anything thereof.
.. But then again, it was not his role to predict, intuit anything; he did exactly what the commedia expected of him: a nice little Keynesian tantrum, followed by a book that told the story (nowadays it would have come with a bonus DVD ... ) ... And then in 1941 (if I remember correctly) to crown his remarkable dramatic career he was made a director of the Bank of England; yes, imagine him, gloatingly gabbing away at the very feet of the High Priest, Montagu Norman ... That's Keynes, the great Keynes, the champion of the enlightened middle-class....
... Not at all. The subprime lever was, locally, just the magnifying device that triggered a collapse that was logically in the making ever since this last bubble was visibly and massively inflated, that is, in the spring of 2002.
.. I have described in broad outlines in "On Money, Heresy and Surrender Part I" the imperial scheme of taxation. [6] Ever since the Neo-Liberal swerve of 1979-1981 under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker
at the Federal Reserve, the US empire, which had been at a near loss for nearly a decade to find a find a proper replacement for its post-war shattered gold scheme, shifted gears and switched to the current purposeful procedure of inflating speculative bubbles. The one that popped in 2008 is, in historical succession, the third of such engineered financial expansions/ implosions.
.. The logic behind them is always the same. The first speculative swell covered the quinquennium of 1982-1987, marking the beginning of an era, Yuppyism: sparked under Reagan, it was eventually daisy - chained to Alan Greenspan's great dot-com bubble of 1994-2001. This last, too, a defining epoch, which is still conditioning us, rose to feature the sublime absurdity of the IPO of the internet company, ie the booster fire-sale of virtual outfits, such as Google, and now, the even more preposterously inconsistent and moronic Facebook - "things" devoid of any economic tangibility. By the time the dot-com was losing steam in March 2001, not to lose momentum, the financial markets began pumping real estate, which, as a proximate, diffusive effect of the dot.com bubble, had already begun to overheat. There followed another mini-cycle of five years, driven in part by the subprime sellout, and, then, crash.
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