quiet american: peace planning

Theodore Modis., Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future, 1992.

pp.182-184

Peace Planning

1967, a little book was published by Dial Press titled Report from Iron Mountian on the Possibility and Desirabilty of Peace.

Leonard C. Lewin,

p.182

“to serve on a commission ‘of the highest importance’. Its objective was to determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with the contingency.”10

p.182

The report was eventually suppressed both by the government committee and by the group itself.

p.183

Lasting peace, while not theoretically impossible, is probably unattainable; even if it could be achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society to achieve it.

That is the gist of what they say. Behind their qualified academic language runs this general argument: War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filing them are developed, the war system must be maintained ── and improved in effectiveness.

p.183

In the report itself, after explaining that war {economy} served a vital subfunction by being responsible for major expenditures, national solidarity, and a stable internal politcal structure, Does goes on to explore the possibilities of what may serve as a substitute for war, in as much as the positive aspects of it are concerned.

p.183

“Whether the substitute is ritual in nature or functionally substantive, unless it provides a believable life-and-death threat it will not serve the socially organizing function of war.”

p.183

They must be “wasteful”

they must operate outside the normal supply-demand system.

the magnitude of the the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular society.

p.183

When the mass of a balance wheel is inadequate to the power it is intended to control, its effect can be self-defeating, as with a run away locomotive.

p.183

our record of cyclical depressions

All have taken place during periods of grossly inadequate military spending.

p.183

alternatives to war {economy}:

war on poverty,

“the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion threat”

space research,

war on pollution

p.184

The White House conducted an inquiry and concluded that the work was spurious.

p.184

Then in 1972 Lewin admitted authorship of the entire document.

p.184

What I intended was simply to pose the issue of war and peace in a provocative way. To deal with the essential absurdity of the fact that the war system, however much deplored, is never-the-less accepted as part of the necessary order of things. To caricature the bankruptcy of the think tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientific thinking to its logical ends. And perhaps, with luck, to extend the scope of public discussion of “peace planning” beyond its usual stodgy limits.

(Prediction : society's telltale signature reveals the past and forecasts the future / Theodore Modis., 1. forecasting., 2. creation (literary, artistic, etc.), 3. science and civilization., CB 158.M63, 303.49--dc20, 1992

, )

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p.18

Analysis focuses on STRUCTURE; it reveals HOW THINGS WORK. Synthesis focuses on FUNCTION; it reveals WHY THINGS OPERATE AS THEY DO. Therefore, analysis yields KNOWLEDGE; synthesis yields UNDERSTANDING. The former enables us to DESCRIBE; the later, to EXPLAIN.

Analysis looks INTO things; synthesis looks OUT of things.

analysis-structure::how things work

synthesis-function ::why things operate the way they do

analysis--yields knowledge, describe how things work

synthesis--yields understanding, explain why things operate the way they do

analysis--look into

synthesis--look out of

Expand

pp.19-20

In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtain-able by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.

pp.18-19

This orientation derives from the preoccupation of systems thinking with the design and redesign of sytems. In system design, parts identified by analysis of the function(s) to be performed by the whole are not put together like unchangeable pieces of of a jigsaw puzzle; they are designed to fit each other so as to work together harmoniously as well as efficiently and effectively.

<skip first sentence of paragraph> To a large extent this book is devoted to illuminating these differences. One such difference is worth nothing here. It is based on the following systems principle:

If each part of a system, considered separately, is made to operate as efficiently as possible, the system as a whole will NOT operate as effectively as possible.

<skip one paragraph about assembling an automobile using the best parts that are available from other autombiles, up to next to the last sentence.> The performance of a system depends more on how its parts inter-act than on how they act in-dependently of each other.

Similarly, an all-star baseball or football team is seldom if ever the best team available, although one might argue that it would be if its members are allowed to play together for a year or so. True, but if they became the best team it is very unlikely that all of its members would be on the new all-star team.

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p.11 one thing

One thing of which we become aware very early in the human learning process is that structures have parts, and that an important aspect of the systematic structure of things is that the relationship among its parts is an important element in the structure and behaviour of any system.

(Boulding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910-, The world as a total system., “This volume is based on a series of lectures presented at the United Nation University, Tokyo, Japan, January/ February 1984.”, “September 1984”, 1. civilization--addresses, essays, lectures, 2. social system--addresses, essays, lectures, 3. system theory--addresses, essays, lectures, 1985, HM 201.B68 1985, p.11)

____________________________________

“By structure I mean the elements in a system and the connections

between the elements — who has what information, who is connected to whom,

and, what decisions are made and where.”;――Jay W. Forrester, June 27-29, 1994, part of Keynote Address for Systems Thinking and Dynamic Modeling Conference

for K-12 Education at Concord Academy, Concord, MA, USA.

____________________________________

There are three common ways of restricting human consciousness:

(1) one is to restrict access to knowledge;

(2) another is to introduce false ideas (including religious ideologies) to create confusion;

(3) a third is to create conflict.

... The principal devices used to control the dialectic process in the past two decades have been

(a) information,

(b) debt and

(America's Secret Establishment, An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, Antony C. Sutton, How The Order creates War and Revolution, Trine Day, Update Reprint 2002, April 1984)

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You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

――Eric Hoffer

- More quotations on: [Enemies] [Fear]

4. Battle Royale

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale

• Japanese novel

• Koushun Takami

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koushun_Takami

• http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/the-hunger-games-a-japanese-original/

• Originally completed in 1996, it was not published until April 1999.

• Plot: From time to time, fifty randomly selected classes of secondary school students are forced to take arms against one another until only one student in each class remains. The program was created, supposedly, as a form of military research, with the outcome of each battle publicized on local television. A character discovers that the program is not an experiment at all, but a means of terrorizing the population. In theory, after seeing such atrocities, the people will become paranoid and divided, preventing another rebellion.

• translated into English by Yuji Oniki and published by Viz Media in 2003

• The Hunger Games

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting

• other mass shooting (FBI classified mass shooting as when there is four or more death in a single shooting incident with fire arms. However, it seems not all mass shooting events are included in the fire arm incidents database.)

• conspiracy theory

• "The Most Dangerous Game," "The Running Man," or "The Lord of the Flies,"

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_%28novel%29

* "[[The Most Dangerous Game]]", a 1924 short story about a big game hunter who fell of a cruise ship, swam onto an isolated island, and get hunted down by another big game hunter like himself

* [[Lord of the Flies]], a 1954 dystopian novel about a group of British boys stuck on an uninhabited island

* [[The Running Man (novel)]], a 1982 science fiction dystopian novel in which contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are chased by "Hunters" employed to kill them.

____________________________________

synthetic terror

[The requested URL was not found on this server.]

http://www.american-buddha.com/911.syntheticterrorch1.htm

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep the people frightened.” Orwell, 1984, 127.

____________________________________

"access to information is not enough, because a framework of understanding is required" ~Noam Chomsky, 2008, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988 by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky)

1915

____________________________________

• the U.S. has big military (probably the biggest in the world)

• military's spending keeps the economy afloat

• military's spending keeps the economy from going into a depression

• the spending creates its own problem

• the military's spending creates and enable a mindset, mental model, and attitude about the world (military industrial complex - the same one from the 2nd world war - the current military industrial complex is bigger)

Johnson, Chalmers A.

Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson.

NEMESIS - In Greek mythology, [Nemesis is] the goddess of retribution, who punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.

p.59

The United States took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with the constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed term in office, the presidential "veto" (Latin for "I forbid")--all of these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read Cicero and both spoke of him as a personal inspiration. The architects of the new American capital were so taken with Rome that they even named the now filled-in creek that flowed where the Mall is today the "Tiber River." 16 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, in writing the Federalist Papers to argue for the ratification of the Constitution, signed their articles with the pseudonym "Publius Valerius Publicola"--who was the third consul of the Roman Republic and the first to personify its values.

(Nemesis : the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson., 1. united states--foreign relations--1989, 2. united states--military policy--, 3. united states--politics and government--1989, p.59)

p.69

SPQR--senatus populus que Romanus (the Senate and the people of Rome)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will watch the watchers?)

p.128

The main base for these aircraft is a remote corner of Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina, where they are serviced by Aero Contractor Ltd., a company founded in 1979 by Jim Rhyme, a legendary CIA officer and the former chief pilot for Air America. 108 The airport is convenient to nearby Fort Bragg, headquarters of the Special Forces, and has no control tower that would allow unauthorized persons to see into the enclave. The fact that Aero's aircraft have permission to land at any U.S. military base worldwide is a dead giveaway to their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribune's John Crewdson, "Only nine companies [including Premier Executive Transport Services] ... have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide." 109

p.298

9. Among the recommended books on the agency's past activities are William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004); Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003); Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: American's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival (New York: Public Affairs, 1999); James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Richard H. Schultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); and Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, Global Intelligence: The World's Secret Services Today (London: Zed Books, 2003).

109. Crewdson, "Mysterious Jets."

p.150

... This is called "burden sharing." Japan spends by far the largest amount of any nation--$4.4 billion in 2002--and every year tries to get its share cut. Perhaps whenever Japan finally succeeds in lowering its "host nation support," the Pentagon will start moving our troops and airmen out of the numerous unneeded locations there. Until then, however, Japan's American outposts are too lucrative and comfortable for the Pentagon to contemplate relocating them. On a per capita basis, the small but rich emirates of the Persian Gulf are the biggest spenders on this form of protection money. Bahrain pays a total of $53.4 million, Kuwait $252.98 million, Qatar $81.3 million, and the United Arab Emirates $217.4 million. 25

The Overseas Basing Commission noted that Germany paid $1.6 billion in 2002 dollars for its U.S. bases, Spain $127.6 million, Turkey $116.8 million, and the Republic of Korea $842.8 million. Yet these are the key nations the Pentagon wants to punish for their lack of cooperation on Iraq. If the United States actually brings its troops home, the host-nation support will have to come from the U.S. taxpayer.

pp.169

Back in 1982, the United States had helped General Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay's dictator from 1954 to 1989, to build a massive military airfield near the town of Mariscal Estigarribia, which now has a population of about two thousand, of whom three hundred are Paraguayan soldiers. The airfield has runways long and strong enough to take B-52 bombers and C-5 Galaxy transports, plus a fully equipped radar system, large hangars, and an air traffic control tower. It is actually bigger than the international airport in the capital, Asuncion. The only thing of note that ever happened at Estigarribia before the American troops arrived was Pope John Paul II's landing there, in May 1988. In the summer of 2005, the Americans immediately set about refurbishing and further enlarging the base.

American troops are free to do almost anything they want in Paraguay. In the May 26, 2005, agreement, the Bush administration extracted a provision exempting its officials and military from the jurisdiction of both the local judicial system and the International Criminal Court. The Special Forces are not subject to customs duties and are free to transport weapons and medical supplies anywhere in Paraguayan territory. 92 This is important for various reasons. Under the terms of Mercosur, the agreement among Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and Paraguay creating a southerncone trading bloc, all parties pledge to inform each other about international developments and to coordinate their foreign policies. Like virtually all other nations in Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay have rejected Bush administration demands for Article 98 Agreements protecting Americans from being turned over to the International Criminal Court. The United States has cut off all forms of aid to the three as a result. In 2004, despite the presence of the Manta base, Ecuador, to, forfeited $15.7 million in U.S. aid, much of it for military equipment, rather than go along with America's pressure tactics. 93 By giving the United States carte blanche in its country, Paraguay is breaking ranks with its neighbors, which has led to speculation that the United States wants to destroy [and/or degrade, disrupt] Mercosur.

pp.223-224

... In 1986, the renowned Russian physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov, advised the Soviet government that Reagan's strategic defense initiative could easily be fooled and/or overwhelmed simply by firing decoys along with Soviet missiles and increasing the number of missiles in any assault. There was no reason, he said, to waste money trying to match an American ABM system. 46 Twenty years later, nothing has happened that would alter his conclusion in any way.

p.322

46. See Fritz Gerald, Way Out There, pp.408-11.

pp.271-272

Even a severe reduction in our numerous deficits (trade, governmental, current account, household, and savings) would still not be enough to save the republic, because of the unacknowledged nature of our economy--specifically our dependence on military spending and war for our wealth and well-being. Ever since we recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s via massive government spending on armaments during World War II, we have become dependent on "military Keynesianism," artifically boosting the growth rate of the economy via government spending on armies and weapons.

"Keynesianism" is named for the English economist John Maynard Keynes, author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, and other influential books. In his writings and his public career, Keynes developed a scheme to save capitalist economies from cycles of boom and bust as well as the severe decline of consumer spending that occurs in periods of depression. He was less interested in what causes these cycles or in whether capitalism itself promotes under-employment and unemployment, than in what to do when an inequitable distribution of income causes people to be unable to buy what their economy produces. To prevent the economy from contracting, a development likely to be followed by social unrest, Keynes thought that the government should step in and, through deficit spending, put people back to work, even if this meant creating jobs artificially. Some of these jobs might be socially useful, but Keynes also favored make-work tasks if that proved necessary, simply to put money in the pockets of potential consumers. Conversely, during periods of prosperity, he thought government should cut spending and rebuild the treasury. He called his plan counter-cyclical "pump-priming."

• Conservative capitalists feared ... too much government intervention would delegitimate and demystify capitalism as an economic system that works by allegedly quasi-natural laws.

• More seriously, too much spending on social welfare might ... shift the balance of power in society from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions.77

• For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back counter-cyclical spending until World War II unleashed a torrent of public funds for weapons.

pp.272-273, p.330

pp.272-273

During the New Deal in the 1930s, the United States tried to put Keynesianism into practice. Through various schemes the government attempted to restore morale--if not full employment. 76 These included "social security" to provide incomes for retired people; giving unions the right to strike (the Wagner Act); setting minimum wages and hours and prohibiting child labour; creating jobs for writers, artists, and creative people generally (the Works Projects Administration); financing the building of dams, roads, schools, and hospitals across the country, including the Triborough Bridge and Lincolm Tunnel in New York City, the Grand Coulee Damn in Washington, and the Key West Highway in Florida (the Public Works Administration); organizing projects for young people in agriculture and forestry (the Civilian Conservation Corps); and setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide flood control and electric power generation in a seven-state area.

The New Deal also saw the rudimentary beginning of a backlash against Keynesianism. Conservative capitalists feared, as the German political scientist and sociologist Jurgen Habermas has noted, that too much government intervention would delegitimate and demystify capitalism as an economic system that works by allegedly quasi-natural laws. More seriously, too much spending on social welfare might, they feared, shift the balance of power in society from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions. 77 For these reasons, establishment figures tried to hold back counter-cyclical spending until World War II unleashed a torrent of public funds for weapons.

p.330

76 See the discussion by Doug Dowd, "U.S. Military Expenditure: Beneficial or Harmful? Or, Who benifit and Who Pays?" State of Nature, Winter 2006, http://www.stateofnature.org/milex.html. See also Robert B. Reich, "John Maynard Keynes: His Radical Idea that Government Should Spend Money They Don't Have May Have Saved Capitalism," Time, March 29, 1999, http://www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/keynes.html.

77 Wikipedia, "Permanent Arms Economy," February 10, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_arms_economy.

p.273

In 1943, the Polish economist in exile Micha Kalecki coined the term "military Keynesianism" to explain Nazi Germany's success in overcoming the Great Depression and achieving full employment. Adolf Hitler did not undertake German rearmament for purely economic reasons; he wanted to build a powerful German military. The fact that he advocated governmental support for arms production made him acceptable to many German industrialists, who increasingly supported his regime. 78 For several years before Hitler's aggressive intentions became clear, he was celebrated around the world for having achieved a "German economic miracle."

Speaking theoretically, Kalecki understood that government spending on arms increases manufacturing and also has a multiplier effect on general consumer spending by raising workers' incomes. Both of these points are in accordance with general Keynesian doctrine. In addition, the enlargement of standing armies absorbs many workers, often young males with few skills and less education. The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like the old Civilian Conservation Corps, but on a much larger scale. Increased spending on military research and development of weapons systems also generate new infrastructure and advanced technologies. Well-known examples include the jet engine, radar, nuclear power, semiconductors, and the internet, each of which began as a military project that later formed the basis for major civilian industries. 79 By 1962-63, military outlays accounted for some 52 percent of all expenditures on research and development in the United States. As the international relations theorist Ronald Steel puts it, "Despite whatever theories strategists may spin, the defense budget is now, to a large degree, a jobs program. It is also a cash cow that provides billions of dollars for corporations, lobbyists, and special interest groups." 80

p.274

By the mid-1940s, everyone in the United States appreciated that the war boom had finally brought the Great Depression to an end, but it was never understood in Keynesian terms. It was a war economy. State expenditures on arms in 1944 reached 38 percent of gross domestic product (the sum total of all goods and services produced in an economy) or GDP, which seemed only appropriate given the nation's commitment to a two-front war. There was, however, a profound fear among political and economic elites as well as the American public that the end of the war--despite all the promises of future peacetime wonders like TVs, cars, and washing machines--would mean a return to economic hard times. Such reasoning lay, in part, behind the extraordinary expansion of arms manufacturing that began in 1947. The United States decides to "contain" the USSR and, in the early 1950s, to move from the production and use of atomic bombs to the building and stockpiling of the much larger and more destructive hydrogen bombs.

Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear weapons possessed some 32,500 deliverable bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. But they perfectly illustrated Keynes's proposal that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and then pay unemployed workers to dig it up. Nuclear bombs were not just America's secret weapon but also a secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we will have 9,960 of them.

The Cold War contributed greatly to the country's sustained economic growth that began in 1947 and lasted until the 1973 oil crisis. Military spending was around 16 percent of GDP and the United States during the 1950s. In the 1960s, the Vietnam War sustained it at around 9 percent, but in the 1970s, strong economic competition from the free riders, Japan and Germany, forced a significant decline in military spending with a consequent U.S. decline into "stagflation" (a combination of stagnation and inflation).

pp.276-277

To understand the real weight of the military Keynesianism in the American economy, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. They are compiled and published in such a way as to minimize the actual size of the official "defense budget." The Pentagon does this to try to conceal from the public the real cost of the military establishment and its overall weight within the economy. There are numerous military activities not carried out by the Department of Defense and that are therefore not part of the Pentagon's annual budgets. These include the Department of Energy's spending on nuclear weapons program ($16.4 billion in fiscal 2005), the Department of Homeland Security's outlays for the actual "defense" of the United States against terrorism ($41 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs' responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion), the Treasury Department's payment of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics), and the Department of State's financing of foreign arms sales and militarily related developmental assistance ($23 billion).

In addition to these amounts, there is something called the "Military Construction Appropriations Bill," which is tiny compared to the other expenditures--$12.2 billion for fiscal 2005--but which covers all the military bases around the world. Adding these non-Department of Defense expenditures, the supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military construction budget to the Defense Appropriations Bill actually doubles what the administration calls the annual defense budget. It is an amount larger than all other defense budgets on Earth combined. 85 Still to be added to this are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed outlays going back to 1916. Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan and many other books on American militarism, estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion. 86

([ who are holding to the war bonds for these interests payment ])

([ $138.7 billion worth of interest payment in 2002 are going to whom ])

([ at 3% interest rate, a $138.7 billion annual interest payment would be about $4,623.33 billion principal, is that right? ])

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http://www.alternet.org/story/47998/737_u.s._military_bases_%3D_global_empire/

By Chalmers Johnson / Metropolitan Books

The following is excerpted from Chalmers Johnson's new book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (Metropolitan Books).

•••• ••• ••••

In some cases, foreign countries themselves have tried to keep their U.S. bases secret, fearing embarrassment if their collusion with American imperialism were revealed. In other instances, the Pentagon seems to want to play down the building of facilities aimed at dominating energy sources, or, in a related situation, retaining a network of bases that would keep Iraq under our hegemony regardless of the wishes of any future Iraqi government. The U.S. government tries not to divulge any information about the bases we use to eavesdrop on global communications, or our nuclear deployments, which, as William Arkin, an authority on the subject, writes, "[have] violated its treaty obligations. The U.S. was lying to many of its closest allies, even in NATO, about its nuclear designs. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, hundreds of bases, and dozens of ships and submarines existed in a special secret world of their own with no rational military or even 'deterrence' justification."

•••• ••• ••••

From the book NEMESIS: The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006 by Chalmers Johnson. All rights reserved.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific.

____________________________________

Article VI

All debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the surpreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary nowithstanding. ([ essentially a backdoor, or, sidedoor to making laws ]) ([ this would also somewhat explain the U.S. violating its treaty obligations - breaking the Law ])

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

____________________________________

‘The most powerful of them were the goddess of destiny, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. They were the three Fates and they decided how long a mortal would live and how long the rule of the gods should last. When a mortal was born, Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured a certain length, and Atropos cut the thread at the end of life. They knew the past and the future, and even Zeus had no power to sway their decisions. Their sister, Nemesis, saw to it that all evil and all good on earth were justly repaid, and all mortals feared her.’, p.70, Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire, Book of Greek myths, 1962.

____________________________________

William R. Clark, Petrodollar warfare, 2005 [ ]

p.220 (pdf - page 241/289)

As Brzezinski noted, the US has acquired a rather “paranoiac” view of the world.56 We must throw off such fears and be realistic; it is we who have changed, not the world. Despite this growing paranoia, no industrialized or developing nation wants the American economy to collapse. They admire our technical base, research and development capability, education system, and of course they want us as consumers. In return, we are expected to be good customers, not a militant imperialist power seeking domination over the world's largest energy supply.

My principal concern is that our nation appears to be on a path like that of the German population of the 1930s, on the verge of becoming a highly militarized society that is fearful of shadowy enemies lurking inside every airplane and distrustful of all allies. We must overcome such irrational fear and peacefully make some painful, but necessary, adjustments to both our economy and our society.

p.221 (pdf - page 242/289)

1) negotiating global monetary reform,

2) broadly re-organizing US fiscal policies,

3) developing a national energy strategy,

4) attempting to repair our damaged foreign relationships with the UN, EU, Russia, and the Middle East by realigning our foreign policies with American principles and human rights, and

5) reigning the unwarranted power of the military-industrial-petroleum-intelligence branch of our government through comprehensive campaign finance reform and massive reallocation of public funds from military spending toward alternative energies and wide-ranging infrastructure energy reconfiguration.

(Petrodollar warfare : oil, Iraq and the future of the dollar, William R. Clark, 2005, )

____________________________________

quiet american

Saturday, January 8, 2022

peace planning

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