"The finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had!"
This is an actual quote out of the mouth of one Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States of America. It was uttered on the occasion of a gathering of soldiers and politicians at the Pentagon to farewell Donald Rumsfeld, the recently resigned Secretary of Defense and a major architect (along with Mr Cheney himself, of course), in the monumental debacle which is the US occupation of Iraq.
The statement is flabbergasting, in its arrogance, in its contempt of both truth and of anyone who may be listening to it, and above all in its sheer effrontery. Mr Cheney knows that Iraq is a disaster. He knows that the majority of Americans know that it is a disaster. He knows that Americans and Iraqis are dying daily for absolutely no purpose except the perpetuation (for another week or month) of US power. He does not care about any of this. He is relying on the proposition that nobody would dare to openly challenge anything stated with force by such an exalted personage as the Vice President of the United States.
Of course, Mr Cheney's statement will be challenged. He knows that too. But he relies on majority of Americans not heeding the challenges, looking only at the office he occupies and ignoring and/or blanking out the man holding the office.
Throughout history, agressors who have "led" their nations into foreign wars have routinely offered similar bald faced statements to their people. These people have a huge "confidence" in their ability to get away with stating or asserting almost anything, simply because they have built a career on doing precisely that and because it has "worked" for them for so long.
The danger, to them, is the war that kills to many of their countrymen, the war that becomes obviously futile, and the war they are losing or are in danger of losing. Sadly, most people only compare a political leader's words with the world as it actually exists around them in times when the world is giving the "lie" to the leaders words in a way which is no longer possible to ignore. Wars provide the most common example of this. Nobody actually wins a war. Even the "winner" has seen his men and women in arms die, has seen his nation impoverished, and may have had destruction rained upon his own nation before that nation finally prevailed. Britain never recovered from WWI, let alone WWII. And the US, in the course of its undeclared wars ever since WWII, has impoverished itself to the point where now the rest of the world holds the future of the nation in its hands.
Have you ever considered the fact that almost every single economic or financial "statistic" released by government is made of "rubber". These statistics are designed firstly to put the absolute best slant on the nature of the economy possible. If this proves impossible, the method of compilation of the statistics are changed to gain the required result. If even this is deemed insufficient, the statistic is no longer reported (a recent example being the cessation of US M-3 reporting last March).
This week, commodity markets in the US did very little, until late trading in New York on Friday, December 15. Then, with the rest of the global commodities markets closed for the weekend, Gold suddenly dropped $US 11.60 and Silver an eye-watering $US 0.96 - or 7 percent.
The catalyst for this was a sudden rush out of their positions in these markets by the ubiquitous US "funds". The catalyst for the rust was a report from the US Department of Commerce asserting that the US CPI number for November had not moved, in other words, that (price) inflation in the US did not exist.
Is this any less flagrant than Mr Cheney's remarks about Mr Rumsfeld? Yet while Mr Cheney's remarks have been met by a quite large amount of incredulity and downright anger inside the US, these preposterous claims concerning the US economy have not only been clutched at fervently by Wall Street, they have passed with hardly a murmour across the nation.
It's true, inflation properly defined as an increase in the total stock of money doesn't kill people or tranform city streets into piles of smoking rubble. It is much more subtle a phenomenon. It merely robs people of the fruits of their labours and bars them from the lives they could have had and enjoyed had the inflation not been there. To debase a currency is to debase the lives of everyone who relies on that currency as a medium of exchange. It robs people of their lives, liberty and happiness without leaving a discernible mark on them. There is no blood, there are no loud noises, there is no terror of bombs bursting in air, there are no refugees, there is no overt physical destruction.
The US financial establishment, and their political counterparts, are in a fight to the absolute finish to preserve, protect, and defend the POWER which they have amassed over the decades. Since they know that without having gained control of what the US uses for money they would never have gained that power in the first place, and since they know that should they lose that control, they will lose the power, they will not pull back as easily from their monopoly control over the Dollar as they will have to from Iraq.
Mr Cheney's remarks about Donald Rumsfeld are offensive to any honest and thinking man. So are Mr Paulson's remarks about the "strong" US Dollar. The difference is that Mr Cheney's remarks are easy to disprove. One just looks at the charnel house which is Iraq and says "see". The whoppers being told about the state of the US economy are not so hard to debunk. This is the famous fundamental problem of Economics as so concisely stated by Henry Hazlitt. It is the problem of what is seen versus what is NOT (literally) seen.
The results of war are obvious. The results of economic and financial debauchery are not. That's the reason why the Bush Administration is not getting away with their Iraq "policies" but they (and their predecessors stretching back at least four decades) ARE getting away with their destruction of the US as a free and prosperous nation. How long will that continue? Nobody knows. The one thing that is certain is that it is not possible to strip out the productive sector of any economy without the most dire consequences. Nor is it possible to debauch a currency without it affecting the lives of EVERYONE.
Economic laws are called laws for a reason. Like the laws of nature, any attempt to "break" them rebounds on those who make it. It can take a short time, or a long time, but it always happens.