Economic Wars of Today and Tomorrow

Tomahawk cruise missiles cost more than a million dollars apiece. When hundreds are launched at nations such a Libya that stimulates the economy of defense contractors. Questions about the relation of economics to modern war may abound, though I will speculate about just a few parameters of the phenomena.
For North Sea oil fields running low and world oil reserves probably having already reached peak production while global demand and population is increasing, securing Libyan oil fields for England, France and Europe’s benefit might seem a poetic bargain since Moamar Kaddafi led invention of the 1972 Arab oil embargo against the west.

If the world has a few developing major economic blocks and ideas about economic and moral correctness-perhaps the Market of the west, Islam and a Chinese block-these major blocks seems to have plate tectonic boundary conflicts that can lead to military conflicts of limited nature.

A Chinese government that would attack Taiwan with high tech weapons and a million man army would risk counter-punching with cruise missiles from Taiwan on it economic infrastructure such as dams and sensitive production facilities. If even 30% of the Chinese infrastructure was halted for some time a popular revolution might transpire. Alternatively if China attacked Taiwan other players might find it a good time to attack China from another direction. Modern games theory seems to be behind several potential conflicts today, especially as economic calculations of the value of targets, weapons and economic losses to rivals and increased economic power to winners seem to have returned to the phenomena of war.

When the Bush II administration choose to accept Kaddafi’s normalization feelers seven years ago much of the American right was discomfited with letting the well known terrorist off the hook. One must wonder if G.W. Bush was setting up a rope-a-dope for a foot in the door to let another administration deliver the knock out punch to the terrorist dictator bring in oil reserves and better contracts with a different post-Kaddafi government?

Moamar Kaddafi long ago was a revolutionary leader receiving support fro the world leftist war against the ‘free world’. He was a radical Islamist as well seeking gains against the ‘Crusader-Colonialists’ in a protracted war of Muslims against the dar al harb. With the end f the cold war the dictator realized in time that he was over-exposed without a K.G.B. backup and Soviet military existential ally I suppose-he sought to renormalize relations with the west after 9-11 in order not to become a target for a Bush II invasion force. Moamar Khadafy was buying time, yet the post 9-11 west placed more demands upon Liberalization than the dictator was willing to afford.

Moamar Kaddafi had order the Pan American airlines flight that flew from the U.S.A. to London t be blown up over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988. I remember the year because I had flown on a similar Pan Am flight the year before close to winter solstice. Eventually some terrorist named Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Megrahi was convicted, Kaddafi implicated yet with the help of BP eventually Scotland released the terrorist for ‘humanitarian reasons’ as he was believed dying of terminal cancer to the tender ministrations of Kaddafi and celebration. Under the current sentiments and spookish planning seem possibly to exist in the phenomena.

With unknown intelligence elements encouraging organization, public Internet twittering and demonstration in Libya led to demands that the dictator resign and his condign response. Thus the U.N. Security Council voted to provide air cover for whatever civilian led military actions against the forces of Kaddafi might follow. One anticipates that the cost benefits to the oil and military industrial elements of interested parties will also bring a future of uncertainty to the nature and cost of support for a post Kaddafi government for the United States.

In a world with increasing population and military capability economic conflicts that stimulate respective power blocks military industrial conflicts will empty their arsenals of weapons that become shelved to long allowing a restocking with new weapons. If weapons are not used the weapons industry cannot perpetuate business activity obviously. The cost of war upon the destruction of particular economic infrastructure may also produce political candidates that represent economic interests wishing to have their global interests protracted from military destruction. Wars and war targets may thus become selected by omission from politically protected status as well as for commission of direct attacks or threats to antagonist military forces.

In a world with increasing military power, reducing number of political power blocks, increasing population and far higher structuring of mass economic subsistence and global trade the occurrence of war will obviously present an increasing danger to collateral global economic continuity, therein creating diamond-cutting quality specialized military assault potential to alter economic balances globally. Such a human social criterion for modern war highlights in failure of human society commonly to pursue the good for-itself instead of the stupid.

In a nation with decreasing use of capital punishment, U.S. annual homicide through war rates have increased markedly since 9-11 when the era of post-cold war peace besides Kosovo or wherever was an era of simple government greed without violence as an economic device. This seems to be an era of increasing government killing cliques of murdering monkeys lusting for economic power and market profit. Alternative development of a more human kind would eliminate fossil fuels from the transportation equation and continue human expansion of the High Frontier on non-biologically populated worlds with peaceful global participation. Humanity can only climb as far as its leaders are allowed to go.

On the Logic of a Post-Military World Order/Direct Death Executives

When the United States and other United Nations member powers launched 112 (later reports suggested hundreds of missiles were launched) million dollar each Tomahawk missiles upon Libya Saturday it suggested that the era of ¾ trillion dollar a year U.S. military costs are not quite over. With the proliferation of missile technology it is easy to envision the chaotic world of the future made possible with a plethora of conventional auto-piloted munitions delivered to g.p.s. coordinates. Yet what of a future world order where science unifies destruction and homicide with political will to act directly?

Instead of a world full of soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors with a cornucopia of high tech specialized weaponry, the ultimate logic of modern weapons of war conferring specific destruction upon grid areas would eliminate military forces and place the particularized power of destruction directly into the hands or voice command of a political leader.

Such scientific progress that would let particle beam devices actually at the speed of light to any location on the planet within a specific bounded are would terminate the need for any other kind of military force beyond ordinary civil gendarmerie and police. Death and destruction delivered with precise computerized accuracy in any shape, quantity or quality globally would terminate whatever opposition force existed at that address.

Though such a weapons development is not all too improbable one day, one must wonder about the theoretical issues that would arise with placing virtually absolute power in the hands of one individual. Would a President with absolute power be willing to give up power? Would a political party with such a power tolerate political plurality?

Human culture has always coexisted with geographic regions. Human race existed within particular areas and changed only as culture changed. Cultures, race, economy and gender roles arise and continued phenomenally to sometimes be destroyed or perish through environmental challenge. Were Neanderthal’s exterminated through interspecies contact with humans with some sort of venereal disease?

Politically, cultural developments and intercultural contacts may occur as national units, regional units or even civilizations. A global culture may have developed, yet subcultures for local autonomy persist enabling members of a stable culture to order their own affairs democratically. Cultures allow competition and differentiation to exist. A global culture and national sub-cultures may be the present form of social organization, yet differentiation is pressured by uniformist political-economic powers seeking elimination of nationalist subcultures; the dissimulation that all people would be free equally to travel with just one world macro-culture is material. There would inevitably be a global financial apartheid of the travelers, financiers and wealth exploiting the politically disempowered majority, or, alternately, a planetary authoritarian computer guided dictatorship of the proletariat would dress all things political in shades of gray.

What sort of logic would guide plural political powers of absolute particle beam specific death that would permit democratic election? If the President of the nations of the United Nations Security Council each had the particle beam power of death for themselves in their national offices, what gaming conditions could be logically developed to assure a just use and transfer of control of the death field after elections?

If nation-cultures are phenomenal facts in the stream of time wherein a stable time-geography existence confers genetic similarity, how would political leaders decide about rightness or wrongness for use of death fields in relation to economic or national-culture times of instability?

The post-military world environment where none are free from the invasive surveillance of corporate organization and/or government may also bring a post-military world in which each existing cultural leader has the power to kill any or all within his polity or that of rival polities at his/her/its fingertips. One must wonder if that era would be one of peace or terror for the voters. In a future post-military world order political leaders might receive weaponry directly from scientific laboratories able to kill select members of the world populous. Would scientist then not themselves necessarily be political partisans and the de facto military providing assists to the Executive homicidalist for more efficient action?

Review 2-'Age of Fracture'

The farther I have read in this book on American society and the evolution and fragmentation of political and economic thought in the United States since maybe 1960, the more I enjoy it. It should win a National Book Award. My undergraduate depth in philosophy and history allows me to appreciate the interdisciplinary scope’s intensity of analysis the Princeton History proff Daniel Rodgers brought to these essays on fracturing or pluralistic platooning of more simple and aggregate forms of social thought in economics, sociology, politics, race, gender studies and more.

I had not considered the fact before that the 1960’s anti-establishment libertarianism of anti-war, anti-draft, anti-government radicals synergized very logically into a 1980’s anti-big government, libertarian anti-state neo-conservative political philosophy. One finds innumerable interesting points in this book to support development of one’s own new political theories as one realizes better where America thought amidst elites has been and how it got to be where it is today.

Even the law has changed significantly on the basis for assigning value and compensation for plaintiff claims. Real social values of damages differ from narrow, proximal differences, and market values of claims damages differ as well with time as an element.

Individuals rather than social aggregations seem to be the present American point of view from which social corrections of class inequalities might be made, or rather, disregarded. If social classes are specious then corrections for class inequalities are as well. This book surveys changes in language and social power structures, from Foucault and on to the philosophies of Rawls, Rorty and Nozick. The contest between structure and destructuralism in social perceptions and power, in the pursuit for social justice and relation to the market comprise dialectical intellectual and political evolution that from my point of view fail to appreciate the frontier, phenomenal and voluntary nature of primitive human social aggregation for which good character seeking to assure freedom and the best possible way of life for all within available environmental resource limits would have a temporal propensity for redistributing wealth to the lowest class of society in order to increase opportunity until it became socially and economically counter-productive to do so.

At this point I will leave off commenting about Rawls’ philosophy and ‘The Age of Fracture’ and describe a better way of regarding society, briefly.

Anarchy, State and Utopia by Nozick was a libertarian reply to Rawls’ earlier book of social philosophy ‘A Theory of Justice’ helpfully summarized by Rodgers in ‘The Age of Fracture’. I have read the classical philosophers of political philosophy, yet not too much the more contemporary as I stayed with analytical philosophy, cosmology and occasional retro-readings (regarding time eg. Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Origin, Athanasius etc.) in theology. Readings in the analytic philosophy of W.V.O. Quine, P.F. Strawson, Cohen, and others led to a better understanding of the nature of language, words and objects and so forth. Because I view society as a phenomenal, evolutionary aggregation that creates its own linguistic and moral ontologies phenomenally and appropriate for various respective stages and circumstances, yet also believe in God and a natural structure of the Universe from its quantum level to a solid state level consistent with the concept of natural law, its rather simple to regard arguments about social roles, social and political power and so forth as also phenomenal historical circumstances. The ideal human society short of the arrival of God to supervise personally, would try to perpetually restore to human society the volunteer, equal access the fundamental material needs and freedom found in a healthy natural environment so far as possible.

In a very advanced society money as power is transcended and the individual has adequate power to provide for individual freedom. The primary political directive would be to prevent any kind of coercive subjugation of anyone else, such that all people would need to associate strictly on a voluntary basis.

Societies evolve and historically appear at any given place and time. Changing a social environment is always challenging and seldom is accomplished without discomfiture to significant portions of the population. When a society reaches a rational material balance with the ecosphere however, when technology becomes environmentally minimalist regarding displacement of the ecosphere and the economics of personal living needs are socially well advanced freeing society from direct needs to the preponderance of repressive competition or exploitation of the environment, then each individual should have enough energy to be creative and survive to prosper intellectually and physically without compiling power or energy in such a way as to be repressive of anyone else in society. In that advanced ecospheric social structure, one that incidentally is space-faring, money, energy or wealth would be freely available like water is to a primitive society in an area with lots of naturally flowing streams. In such a context of rational and socially prosperous economic management there would be no reason for anyone to try to dam up or compile excess water for-themselves anymore so than there would be a reason for a hundred wandering Indians living in Eastern Oregon 15,000 years ago to fence property.

Human civilization has existed for about 8,000 years, and the progress of human society in economics might be fairly measured by observing how it provides its members with food and other necessities of life. Before civilization, with a far smaller population, most of humanity had sufficiency in food. Human freedom was general as slavery largely is a consequence of organized social subjugation. With economic progress much of humanity is subjugated by bureaucratic and organizational structures requiring servitude in exchange for food, shelter and other necessaries. Medical advances are vast improvements over pre-civilization human conditions, yet they are not available to all and for many require a kind of financial bondage to get (debt). The advance of civilization will require a rectification of the deficiencies in these conditions.

One day when economic rationality has advanced far enough freedom from want for all of humanity may be a fact, and the ecosphere might simultaneously be restored. The prevention of crime and ecospheric unfeasibility vis demographics and continuity might be the sole coercive governance in a rational society with a productive economy of a lowest entropy condition.

Every individual might create a secure home as easily as flipping open a self phone that would disappear when flipped shut. No cause for permanent geographic displacement of ecosphere or geographic area would exist. Economic competition would stop. Quality technical progress could continue. Yet that would be more like the pursuits of knowledge that ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians pursued; knowledge for its own sake. Dialectical conversations would occur, and material fabrications could be accomplished when necessary for some particular exploration venture. Generally though the advanced society would have accomplished insinuation into the Earth ecosphere in the most energy efficient and effective way practical with barriers to travel overcome, communication ubiquitous, freedom defended and the economy renaturalized as an equivalent to nature able to cohere non-invasively within the ecosphere (nature).

Space-Time Slope and Mass Gravity ©2011 GaryCGibson (poem)

When the slope of space-time Universe flows
outward upon the course of nothingness
across those depths of empty infinity
the wasteland without sound or meaning
mass energy cannot return over extra-dimensions of self
to journey with spatial dimensions directed
like never ending frontiers of echoes
along free running river courses of potential

Mass aggregating in steady states
has larger dimensions to themselves
tumbling like stones in a rock polisher
gems of refracting light in molecular forms
mass energy collapsing inward as space flows outward
the infinite directions expanding forever
while mass contracts within its being
compacting efficient effacement of dissipation

Macro-Classification of Words©2011GaryCGibson

Spent fuel rods of economic power
gather heat for-themselves
glowing in the dark
alpha beta and gamma radiation mark
times and half lives past
waves of change superimposed on plate
boundaries like rings of fired, rehired
outsourced possibilities of planetary rationality
Intuited power structures dissipated
control of cultural hegemonies
radio and television waveforms
the leader playing golf with the common duffer
envisioning the way things are together
individuals without aggregated ideas
with democracy a collectivist measure
of how far the commons is trusted
against the realistic market of infinity
extending like a fog bank of dreams
through which rational gambling sojourners follow after truth
after Jordan across the pacific
stuff Chicago hoops with meatpacker sausage cartridges

Microeconomic dominion of rational hedonism
ending at the invisible shoreline
with impotent governance of echoes
mathematical models of realism imagined
as most real utopian takeovers of market share
an existential transcendence of the ego
over the troubles of borders, wars, plagues, budgets
A dream state of neo-realism become one global market
a fearless leader on the Temple Mount
to survey a new world order of solidarity
aggregated expressions of philosophical class consciousness
like the green lizards versus the red
receivers versus the f word, young, old, Chinese, Afros
H class hits, herpes, and hates hated
hip desires valued in standard abstract currency
inflation of the populist, standardized model A of political realism
placing power within the market itself
as the Supreme Guide of political criteria
disregards the implicit ecospheric definition of power
empowered in ideas, shadows, structures, seasons, sounds and everything evolving in the ecosphere
power in ideas to construct a compliment to natural reality
for human habitations like those created by God
fashion mud into dwellings of the soul.

Would Iran Control Persian Gulf Entrances With Revolution in Bahrain?

When the Saudi royal family sent 150 armored personnel carriers to reinforce the Bahraini royal government-a Sunni government like that of the Saudi, I was reminded of the long shadow cast by the radical Shia government of Revolutionary Iran in middle eastern affairs. If the civil uprising in Bahrain by Shia militants led to an abdication and takeover to Shia rule, would Americans observe formation of a democratic government in Bahrain by people speaking a language that has no words for democracy in it?

For domestic U.S. news consumption we learn that uprising in the Middle East by organizers using Twitter and Facebook invariable would create a democratic government if successful. If sectarian rule is democratic with complete repression of the opposite Islamic mosques and people from government perhaps that is so. Nevertheless there are many questions to ponder on the issue of political stability in the strategically important tiny nation of Bahrain.

How did a Sunni ruling class form historically in Bahrain, and where did the Shia come from that live in Bahrain today-were they illegal aliens arriving after the British created the nation following world war one?

If Shiist government takes over will Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq be there spiritual guide, or will it be the Supreme Guide Khomeinehi of Iran? If a Shia government takes over will Iran home-port naval warships there to control both sides of the entrance to the Persian Gulf? Will Iran deploy missiles to Bahrain able to hit all Saudi oil production facilities from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf? Will Iran sponsor the creation of the Hezbollah political party in Bahrain as it supports Hezbollah in the Lebanon? Americans have no answers to most of these simple questions reaching mundane political discussion.

Saudi Arabia is the wealthiest of Arab nations. The oil of the nation is half gone already, and one must wonder about the prosperity of a Saudi Arabia with a democratic government locked in civil, political turmoil and economic management something more like that of the United States; would it begin running deficits too and accelerate the wasting of its natural oil wealth before returning to the desert status of Yemen? Perhaps a slow evolution to a constitutional monarchy is in Saudi Arabia’s future. The effort to continuously grow national prosperity I that nation may perhaps suffer with too much restive political agitation if not pluralistic terrorist actions in support of takedown of the government. Such leveraged underpinning would not necessarily be followed by construction of a democratic government. We might think to ask who the people are, where they are from, what additional interests are present and so forth in regarding the opposition constituency in Twitter-Facebook inspired ‘instant’ uprisings seeking to borrow U.S. political and military power.

Atomic Power Investors Say Everyone is Radioactive Already-No Worries

Numerous talking heads defending nuclear power plant construction and the no-danger nature of atomic fission piles producing electricity have reassured the public that everyone already emits radiation themselves and a little more won’t hurt them. They also say that nuclear power plants are a ‘smart choice’, yet each premise is false.

Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State still has an unfunded 50 billion dollar clean-up cost. Hanford was the site of the nation’s first federal nuclear power facility and has a few mothballed plants there that cost taxpayers billions and billions.

Market forces have conquered U.S. government economic policy planning. President Obama threw in the toll on ending Bush era tax cuts wholeheartedly indicating his underlying market political philosophy. That market philosophy of government is based on economic and social science theories since the 70’s the government isn’t capable of rational economic intervention-it can only bail out large market players when they stumble because of imperfect knowledge of the market conditions.

That is a kind of rational market existential philosophy. The poor are deleted from Democratic political concerns, as is full employment as they have signed off on a natural unemployment rate versus rise of inflation (NAIRU) paradigm as an unavoidable deterministic fact.

Market philosophy dominance of politics can neutralize the reality of democracy. Democratic governments, it is held, should not moderate economics through public sector goal setting and intervention. Instead, they should reinforce the market and let the democracy of buying stock be the rationality that determines governance. Power is implicitly found in the market culture. Electrical power supply and consumption management should be a part of government duty in regard to national paradigm setting. Absolute power supply and consumption in itself may become absolutely corrupt when market forces alone determine the philosophical parameters of its use. All of nature-all of the mass that exists is an equivalent of energy. Atomic fission and fusion of mass to release energy is best left to nature, and the natural history of evolution of the cosmos, for the stars and other processes. Human and other biological life exists at a much different temperature range and should innovate more benign methods of harnessing power to sustain itself and its life processes.

A blind government reliant upon the magic hand of market structuring of society is one that finds atomic power plants ‘smart’. It also support coal, cap and trade, oil consumption and whatever else develops on the market. The ideas of government setting goals and criteria for the market are lost. Democratic governance becomes dumb.

If the U.S. Government were to make nuclear plants, coal plants producing emissions, strip mining of coal and hydro electric dams illegal the national ecology would reasonable be better off. The market values increased consumption however, and thus atomic power plants are regarded as ‘smart’ ways to keep the nation’s power consumption increasing.

Ecological values and values for human survival as well as national independence differ from pure market values quite often. In fact many value theories and systems exist from which a democracy may select those that best enhance the quality of life of the citizens. If dangerous, ecospherically disruptive energy technologies are banned in the United States the market would evolve, like a forest in the devastated St. Helen’s eruption aftermath, to grow a new forest to fill in the empty wasteland.

The market finding atomic, coal and hydroelectric power banned would value wind, solar, geothermal and fuel cell power highly and invest in tech races to supply new power technology. Superconductor technology would be applied along with better building design and insulation strategies. Smart new methods of living and producing and using electricity would flow directly into the voids left by the departure of 1920’s era coal, oil and hydroelectric power along with half century old nuclear-power for peace paradigms.

Atomic power plants are high on a list of implicit threats to life on Earth. In some future global conflict thousands of the plants could be destroyed and hundreds or thousands of years of destruction and/or mutation to human and other living species become a routine fact of the planetary surface and oceanic depths.