Source: Global Research.ca
Paul Craig Roberts
If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.
With
Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries
where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent
US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s
Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling
dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner,
welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US
troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and
foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral
verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not
have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and
Pakistan’s.
Washington
has revived the Great Power Game and is vying with China. Whereas
China brings Africa investment and gifts of infrastructure, Washington
sends troops, bombs and military bases. Sooner or later Washington’s
aggressiveness toward China and Russia is going to explode in our
faces.
Where
is the money going to come from to finance Washington’s African
Empire? Not from Libya’s oil. Big chunks of that have been promised to
the French and British for providing cover for Washington’s latest war
of naked aggression. Not from tax revenues from a collapsing US economy
where unemployment, if measured correctly, is 23 percent.
With Washington’s annual budget deficit as huge as it is, the money can only come from the printing press.
Washington
has already run the printing press enough to raise the consumer price
index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) to 3.9% for the year (as of the
end of September), the consumer price index for urban wage earners and
clerical workers (CPI-W) to 4.4% for the year, and the producer price
index (PPI) to 6.9% for the year.
As statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com)
has shown, the official inflation measures are rigged in order to hold
down cost of living adjustments to Social Security recipients, thus
saving money for Washington’s wars. When measured correctly, the
current rate of inflation in the US is 11.5%.
What
interest rate can savers get without taking massive risks on Greek
bonds? US banks pay less than one-half of one percent on FDIC insured
savings deposits. Short-term US government bond funds pay essentially
zero.
Thus,
according to official US government statistics American savers are
losing between 3.9% and 4.4% of their capital yearly. According to John
Williams’ estimate of the real rate of inflation, US savers are losing
11.5% of their accumulated savings.
As
retired Americans receive no interest on their savings, they are having
to spend down their capital. The ability of even the most prudent
retirees to survive the negative rate of interest they are receiving and
the erosion by inflation of any pensions that they receive will come to
an end once their accumulated assets are exhausted.
Except
for Washington’s favored mega-rich, the one percent that has captured
all of the income gains of recent years, the rest of America has been
assigned to the trash can. Nothing whatsoever has been done for them
since the financial crisis hit in December 2007. Bush and Obama,
Republican and Democrat, have focused on saving the 1 percent while
giving the finger to the 99 percent.
Finally,
some Americans, though not enough, have caught on to the flag-waving
rah-rah “patriotism” that has consigned them to the trash bin of
history. They are not going down without a fight and are in the
streets. Occupy Wall Street has spread. What will be the fate of this
movement?
Will
the snow and ice of cold weather end the protests, or send them into
public buildings? How long will the local authorities, subservient to
Washington as they are, tolerate the obvious signal that the population
lacks any confidence whatsoever in the government?
If
the protests last, especially if they grow and don’t decline, the
authorities will infiltrate the protestors with police provocateurs who
will fire on the police. This will be the excuse to shoot down the
protestors and to arrest the survivors as “terrorists” or “domestic
extremists” and to send them to the $385 million dollar camps built
under US government contract by Cheney’s Halliburton.
The Amerikan Police State will have taken its next step into the Amerikan Concentration Camp State.
Meanwhile,
lost in their oblivion, conservatives will continue to bemoan the
ruination of the country by homosexual marriage, abortion, and “the
liberal media.” Liberal organizations committed to civil liberty, such
as the ACLU, will continue to rank a woman’s right to an abortion with
defense of the US Constitution. Amnesty International will assist
Washington in demonizing its next target for military attack while
turning a blind eye to the war crimes of President Obama.
When
we consider what Israel has got away with, being as it is under
Washington’s bought protection--the war crimes, the murders of children,
the eviction in total disregard of international law of Palestinians
from their ancestral homes, the bulldozing of their houses and uprooting
of their olive groves in order to move in fanatical “settlers,” the
murderous invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the wholesale slaughter of
civilians--we can only conclude that Washington, Israel’s enabler, can
get away with far more.
In
the few opening years of the 21st century, Washington has destroyed the
US Constitution, the separation of powers, international law, the
accountability of government, and has sacrificed every moral principle
to achieving hegemony over the world. This ambitious agenda is being
attempted while simultaneously Washington removed all regulation over
Wall Street, the home of massive greed, permitting Wall Street’s
short-term horizon to wreck the US economy, thus destroying the
economic basis for Washington’s assault on the world.
Will the US collapse in economic chaos before it rules the world?
