DickCheney – ILANA MERCER

The Perils Of Presidential ‘Yellow-Peril’ Fever

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 06:20:19 +0000

Trade barriers are not in the overall interest of the American consumer, as they violate his freedom of contract and association ~ilana

In the course of the second presidential debate, Mitt Romney was asked to differentiate himself from the justifiably despised George Bush. The Republican presidential contender, who has surrounded himself with neoconservative heavy hitters—and has called Dick Cheney a “person of wisdom and judgment”—listed a number of inconsequential distinctions.

Left off was a distinction that reflects favorably on Bush. Like Mr. Obama, George W. Bush did not “label China a currency manipulator,” something Romney has promised to do on his first day in office. This dubious distinction, if anything, belongs to “the Clinton administration,” also the only administration to ever so do.

Labeling China a currency manipulator, to quote Mr. Romney, “would allow me as president to be able to put in place, if necessary, tariffs where I believe that they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers.”

The same executive-branch omnipotence allowed Barack Obama to go all-out on matters menstrual. Judging by the questions culled by moderator Candy Crawly, America’s female lobby wants a sugar daddy in the White House. Such sentiments, with their attendant wish lists, are easily gratified, given the plenary powers of the presidency.

Yes, feelings are Barack Obama’s forte; facts not so much. The president, poor man, is up a stream without a paddle. Obama is working with all he’s got. It’s hard to blame him for his inability to explain the inexplicable. And it is this. On the topic of the imagined perils of the “Yellow Peril,” here’s what escaped Obama, who was as eager to impress voters with his me-too Sinophobia:

The president’s Commerce Department has just slapped “tariffs ranging from about 34 to nearly 47 percent on most solar panels imported from” China. The meddlers in Commerce had “determined that Chinese companies were benefiting from unfair government subsidies and were selling their products in the United States below the cost of production, a practice known as dumping.”

So now Uncle Sam is calibrating the “costs of production” around the world! Cui bono, pray tell? Or, translated: for whose benefit?

Clearly, the low “costs of production” outside the US irk special interests stateside.

The US president—Democratic or Republican—enjoys a monopoly over the use of force over an enormous territory. Being the ultimate decider, he is at once willing and able to pick every pocket in this vast land of ours, be it for the ladies or for labor (the politically influential kind).

If you’re in the market for “cheap rooftop solar panels,” you might have to reconsider, because prices are about to go through the roof. Similarly, if you’re in “the burgeoning business of installing cheap rooftop solar panels,” as hundreds of industries are—expect your enterprise to shrink or go under. All in order to keep local, politically efficient industries in the lap of luxury.

Indeed, tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping penalties, or any other trade barrier, compel American consumers to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. Trade barriers are thus not in the overall interest of the American consumer, as they violate his freedom of contract and association.

Typically, antidumping penalties are imposed by the West on poorer nations to stop them from selling their wares bellow our market prices. These protectionist policies are detrimental to less-developed and Third-World countries, which gain advantage through the use of one of the few resources they have in abundance, their labor.

Ultimately, dumping is good for all cash-strapped consumers. Both the president and the incumbent flout freedom and flirt with fascism when they threaten to come between Americans and their cheap, Chinese, consumer goods.

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The ‘Presstitutes’ Vs. The VP

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So long as they’re being treated as the demigods they believe they are, media—liberal and illiberal—act like lap dogs to the Big Dogs ~ilana

I‘m no fan of Vice President Cheney or his boss. Still less am I enamored of the media, liberal and illiberal. They are, for the most, enablers of power, props to the politicos. So long as they’re being treated as the demigods they believe they are, media—liberal and illiberal—act like lap dogs to the Big Dogs. Did not the “presstitutes” enable the invaders of Iraq? You bet they did, with the liberal Judith Chalabi of the New York Times in the lead.

Dare to disturb the delicate symbiosis between these parasites and their host, as the veep did, and the fleas make the fur fly. For close to a fortnight now we’ve been subjected to media grand mals over Mr. Cheney’s accident. Or rather, over the delay and circuitous way in which the press found out that he had accidentally shot Harry Whittington during a quail hunt.

Jonathan Alter of “Newsweek” admitted, unabashed, that Cheney and his handlers messed with his colleagues’ (read: ME, ME, ME) collective sense of importance, by briefing a local newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, first. He justified their ensuing mindless fits of pique with these vainglorious words:

No wonder the [media] went crazy after learning of the shooting accident from a Texas paper… Cheney is telling the men and women assigned to cover the White House that they are irrelevant.

Come now; did the likes of Alter and NBC’s David Gregory need Mr. Cheney to tell them that? We can all agree that the press’s irrelevancy credentials are well-established and beyond reproach. The persistence with which they kept this relatively unimportant event in the headlines proves the point.

Alter’s was not the last word from “Newsweek” on the topic. Evan Thomas wowed his readers with who in Washington returned his calls, and how many members of his genus (reporter) per square mile accompanied Cheney on his retreats (none).

Look, the shooting may have been handled inefficiently and Cheney, it would seem, was both negligent and incompetent. However, this misfortune is almost immaterial in the grand scheme of things—Iraq, Darfur, debt and deficits, and the Danish cartoons, which the stumblebum press failed to publish or process.

The news nincompoops are fast becoming “irrelevant,” because they have no allegiance to objective truth and journalistic standards; only to their perches. Furthermore, for them to protest being treated dismissively is the ultimate performative contradiction—not that different from the contradiction the stampeding Muslim mobs present. The latter have been acting as terrorists to protest that their prophet was depicted as a terrorist; the former have been acting as idiots to protest being treated as irrelevant.

I counted a couple of “Time” Magazine features that used the shooting to psychologize, à la Oprah, about the Darth Vader of politics and his penumbral extracurricular pursuits (hunting, eating beef). Any half-wit with a vaguely normal range of affect, however, has to know that Mr. Cheney’s mishap, not that uncommon among hunters (our shooting instructor, who lives to popularize guns, told us he never goes hunting and advised the same), must have devastated all involved, including the VP.

Jonathan Alter closed with this bit of condescension:

The media often focus on relatively unimportant, easy-to-understand stories as metaphors for shortcomings that the normal conventions of the business (and the inattentiveness of the audience) make hard to convey.

Yes, the sages that slept with their sources at the onset of the extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”; who subjected their readers and viewers to a perspective on the war as monochromatic as the green of night-vision optics, and who routinely privilege spectacle over substance—these stellar reporters are now, and for the benefit of us bumpkins, focusing their acute powers of observation on the symbolism of the veep’s accident.

Fiddlesticks! The media have not concentrated on this story as a service to the public or to the truth. Their coverage of the accidental shooting of Whittington has been entirely self-referential and self reverential. This was about them, and nothing else.

I can think of many material, not metaphoric, stories that would benefit the mulcted and misled masses. This was not one of them.

More to the point, members of the media ought to report about reality, not act out on their immense egos and limited powers of abstraction by assigning “symbolic” meaning to relatively minor events.

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BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals,’ which James Madison warned war would bring ~ilana

The chattering classes are doing what they do best, and that is to shed darkness wherever they go. This column informed readers about the Niger lie in March 2003, after Muhammad ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, unceremoniously and politely called the allegation that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa “inauthentic.” It’ll take the mainstream media a few years to work out, but many in the administration (not least Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney) had been sitting on this intelligence since February 2002, when a diplomat called Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA and the State Department to ferret it out.

Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say?

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told the New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
July 16, 2003

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WARTIME SOCIALISM

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 30 Apr 2003 00:00:00 +0000

War, especially a gratuitous one, always destroys individually owned real assets and capital ~ilana

“It is often sadly remarked,” wrote Henry Hazlitt, the distinguished free market writer, “that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths.” This, ventured Hazlitt, comes about because the bad economists are presenting half-truths. A consummate gentleman, Hazlitt did not explicitly spell out that propagating half-truths still makes someone a wholesale liar. Or that these economists owe their perpetual popularity to the intellectual legitimacy they provide to the plundering class, the politicians.

For what politician would not warmly welcome an economist who, with the aid of indecipherable econometrics, legitimizes immoral power and property grabs? This is why the anti-free market central planning advocated by the late John Maynard Keynes has been embraced with renewed verve by George Bush. Like any good Keynesian, Bush sees big government—huge public works—and big deficits (especially during depressions), not as a bane but as a blessing, to be embraced as the key to economic boom.

Hazlitt (drawing on Frederic Bastiat, the 19th century French economist and statesman) further hammered home that “the art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

When the Hazlitt prescription is followed, it becomes abundantly clear why a war, especially a gratuitous one, always destroys individually owned real assets and capital. And why, in the short term, the war against Iraq will benefit some at the expense of others; in the long run, it will benefit none.

Keynesians, however, stand by the absurdity that war is good for the economy. And while you won’t find these economists suggesting that, in order to create jobs in their own communities, people should set fire to their homes, and so help spur economic activity among local builders, landscapers, plumbers, and electricians, the very same “experts” have no qualms touting the economic benefits that accrue from taking a wrecking ball to an entire country.

According to figures provided by Yale professor William Nordhaus and the Council of Foreign Relations, the eventual costs of the war on Iraq will be roughly $1.2 trillion. Mr. Bush, however, proudly presides over a budget deficit, the official upbeat estimate of which is $455 billion. Since this figure doesn’t include off-budget spending, and since estimates of the preliminary costs of the war run to $200 billion, the deficit is more likely to be upward of $600 billion.

And since there’s no free lunch, who is going to pay for the debauchery?

The finances for the war, of course, will come from the private economy. For every dollar the government spends, a dollar is suctioned from you and me. For every new smiling military recruit sitting pretty with a home, a porch, and a pension, some poor sod will join the army of (nine million) unemployed.

Given its debt, the U.S. government is fast becoming a bad risk as a borrower. To finance the war, then, it’ll have to steal over and above the usual call of duty. Unlike “The Shrub” currently in power, Ronald Reagan understood a thing or two. He said this: “The truth is that inflation is caused by government. It’s caused by government spending more than it takes in, and it will go away just as soon as government stops doing that.”

More precisely, inflation is an increase in the money supply by the government. Having adopted deficit spending as an article of faith, Bush will call on the Federal Reserve and the printing press to print money to pay the costs of the war. The endemic price hikes and economic distortions that’ll follow are but a by-product of this legalized counterfeiting.

Reports of freshly minted dollars making their way from the Federal Reserve Bank to millions of Iraqis, now on the U.S. payroll, suggest that the money market is already being flooded. The first counterfeit down payment on the war will soon be wending its way into the coffers of the selected war contractors and their employees.

So why is this so bad? Doesn’t more paper money make us all richer?

No, it doesn’t. Real wealth is created only by the production and consumption not of paper money, but of products. An abundance of goods, not money income, is what makes for an increase in wealth. When the initial $1 billion worth of new money is given to corporate cronies like Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction arm of Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Bechtel Corporation, it will immediately spur an artificially created demand, causing their suppliers to raise their prices. It’ll take time, but the new money will generate price hikes throughout the economy.

Rest assured though that Bechtel’s George Schultz, the former Secretary of State, who is also the chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, will get his honey well before you taste any, unless, of course, you work for said company or for the Parsons Corp, or the Louis Berger Group, or any other of the corporations involved in war profiteering.

Rest assured too that another Bechtel senior vice president by the name of Jack Sheehan, who, according to the British Observer, is also “a retired general who sits on the Defense Policy Board which advises the Pentagon,” will enjoy a fat cheque well before the general price increases caused by all the new money affect his purchasing power. Jack will get to spend the new wads before counterfeit coinage spreads across the economy, causing prices to rise.

By the time you and I, politically unconnected suckers that we are, experience a meager rise in money income (but not in tangible wealth), rising prices will have obliterated the tiny gain.

If civil society is the sphere in which people accomplish things by engaging in productive, peaceful, and voluntary exchanges, the state is the sphere where domination is achieved legally by force and destruction. And of late, the state has been encroaching on ever-larger portions of civil society. Under Bush, the shift of resources from the productive, private sector to the inherently unproductive bureaucracy and military-industrial complex hasn’t been equaled in decades.

At the same time, the wasteful, wealth-destroying political and military might involved in exporting democracy is nudging Americans into cultivating a comparative—even an absolute—advantage in violence and force, at the risk of losing their edge in productive innovation.

Last but not least, the process of forcibly creating a demand for certain wartime products and shifting production away from others also skews a consumer-driven production pattern. Since there are no freebies, those working for this centrally planned command economy will benefit while others foot the bill.

* Image courtesy of the Mises Institute.

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