Global Economy, Politics, Publish, Russia, Ukraine

Is Putin a Monster? Or are we trying to make him one?

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Vladimir Putin, Bellicose War-Monger? Or just doing his duty?
Vladimir Putin, Bellicose War-monger? Or just doing his duty?

Are the Russians the Real Aggressors?

Who is Vladimir Putin?

Putin was born in October of 1952. He is 62 years old.  He was born to a Russian family that apparently knew the pain of World War II well. He had two brothers who were older than he, both dying before the second world war. One of the two, Victor, succumbed to Diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad, the other, Albert died a few months after birth .  Both parents suffered mightily at the hands of the German dictator. Putin’s father, Vladimir Spiridonovich,  was drafted as a submariner, which is about as tough on the nerves as military assignments can get(especially during those times when this technology was new.) He later served as a member of the internal police, demolitions squad and was severely wounded during the second world war at the front.  His mother Maria Ivanova was a factory worker.

His grandparents have no notable history other than what is common for Russians who lived during the very difficult times of Stalin’s rule. However, his maternal grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovanich  was a chef who cooked for Vladimir Lenin’s wife, and on a few occasions for Joseph Stalin. His maternal grandmother died at the hands of German occupiers during the war; his uncles disappeared at the Russian front, events which would not likely have left the boy Vladimir untouched emotionally by the personal tragedy of that terrible war.

Although he was brought up under the communist doctrine on religion, yet, by all accounts Vladimir Putin is a devout Christian, often professing a deep faith in the Russian Orthodox tradition, a religion which particularly emphasizes compassion as the cornerstone of faith. Though his father may have been a “dedicated” atheist who lived under the stern communist apprehension of mass religion, it seems his son Vladimir was perhaps influenced by his mother’s faith which, apparently,  survived the Communists .

As a boy Putin was rowdy, and apparently often tried to emulate a popular screen characterization  of an intelligence officer. Putin quickly learned Judo and other martial arts becoming strong and athletic in the process. This aggressive side of his persona is also quite often made visible by his public demeanor, and it seems the Russian voters are impressed since his popularity is quite high; he seems personally dedicated to law and order, and the Russian people seem to have the same desire-perhaps there they feel they can find individual justice -something elusive in their turbulent internal history. Putin strongly opposes the use of capital punishment though the majority of Russians still want it. (you can find much more about him at wikipedia)

Politics

Putin’s political history is extensive- about the only thing he has done in his life is to serve the public. Of importance is that he was a KGB agent fully aware of the international scope of Russia’s history. Whether he was a great KBG agent is disputed. There were times in his career where he seemed to be a menial stamp jockey for the service. Yet he was fully consumed by Russia’s dealings with the West, and especially on the commercial front.

It is notable that he himself seemed to have no confidence in the old Soviet Union, something which is quite evident in many of his speeches- Putin is no communist, and most probably the exact opposite. Yet he was a loyal public servant all of his life, and walked a very fine line at times between loyalist and traitor.  We should note carefully that he resigned from the KGB when he had realized that they intended to overthrow Michael Gorbachev on the very next day. From this we must conclude that Putin was indeed prone to a democratic Russian state from a very early point in his career, and though deeply loyal to the KGB, he was still able to maintain a personal conscience and an obligation to what he thought was the greater good of the Russian state.

Even after the fall of the Soviet state, Putin maintained his intelligence activities but this time for the purpose of promoting free enterprise.

For a long time he was hired as a front man for the Mayor of St Petersburg seeking to entice western businesses with an appetite for expansion into the new Russian state.  He had gone from an intelligence officer to an international marketing specialist of sorts. Having served in East Germany before its fall he had apparently acquired some skills in the language and customs of Western Europeans and used that experience to help promote closer business ties to the newly capitalist Russian Federation.

Boris Yeltsin’people  saw in Putin a man with the right views at the time, and so assigned him to take a position in the lower level of the government. Placed in the Property Management division, he was charged with the task of transferring foreign property from the former Soviet Union to the new Russian Federation. Thus his knowledge of international affairs and systems was once again put to use; his connections to, and knowledge of western entities also probably increased. Later on he would become chief of the FSB under Yeltsin, which was the new incarnation of the old KGB.

It is quite possible that he never actually left the intelligence field altogether. Perhaps he was charged with more than just transferring property while working at the property office, since his assumption of head of the FSB was abrupt and had little precedence in his career path. He went from property manager to leader of the intelligence service, a long jump so it is possible he was doing a little more than stated for Boris Yeltsin, perhaps listening where ears were needed.

From 1997 on, he rose very quickly through the ranks. He assumed full power after the resignation of President Yeltsin while serving in the less powerful position of Russian prime minister in 1999. At the time Yeltsin was accused of corruption and once again Putin would have to decide between the lesser justice and the greater good.  He quickly cleared Yeltsin from any possible prosecution.

Being that he was present, and probably working in a quasi-intelligence position of sorts at the time, he was able to see first-hand what was needed to bring the Russian system to a better purpose while serving under Yeltsin during the highly volatile period of Russia’s early formation, when corruption was rampant, and almost necessary since laws were not yet clearly established, or prosecuted in the courts.

In a state like Russia at that time, corruption is sometimes the only way to anything even remotely pragmatic, yet Putin seemed from the start inclined to those principles promoted by Gorbachev, Perestroika and Glasnost, openness and free markets, and kept a long eye on the prize of a free and well regulated democracy.

Much like Libertarian Ron Paul is in the United States, an idealist with good intentions, Putin too must have realized that ideals take time and effort to be put into practice, and as Ron Paul has to deal with a sometimes rowdy self serving congress not usually too idealistic, so too Putin had to deal with the Russian body politic which was hardly in a position to be idealistic,  and oftentimes it was easier and less costly in the long run to make do with what was available than requiring immediate change, if even that was  the ultimate objective. While Ron Paul’s ideas are targeted towards an advanced democracy, Putin’s ideas and practice was targeted to a nascent, still forming democracy. In some ways we can think of Putin as the Russian counterpart of an American Libertarian from what we can see. He seems to respect personal freedom for as long as it does not impinge upon the sanctity of the Laws which protect everyone’s freedom. Putin however, is dealing with a very young state, albeit a very old people, and so the problems of personal freedom versus the integrity of the state may be quite different than what a consummate Libertarian might face in the United States.

In a nascent state, that is in the early stages of consolidation, personal power, and reach, as well as immediate force is often the determining factor between success and failure of an implementation. Putin’s connections to the secret service with all its apparent powers must have lent effectiveness to his power of persuasion, especially if he really had been listening and noting all that was said  while at the property management office. Inside knowledge always gets respect in every government, and there is little doubt that he had inside knowledge to leverage his opinions, and implement his strategies.

What is notable in Putin however, and should not be disputed by this time,  is that he really seems to believe in the Free Market system, at least his history, actions and dialogue support this conclusion. But like many Libertarians he feels that this Free Market system-which seeks to be fair to everyone in the market, while giving no one a political advantage- is easily corrupted and that maintaining the Free Market system can only be accomplished by thorough diligence over a very long period of time.

We are not saying that Putin is a Libertarian, but that given time, in an advanced democracy like ours, his fundamental impulse could well evolve in that direction. It is easy to understand his defense of religion, for example, when you consider that under communism it was banned altogether. Putin does seem inclined, despite the bad press in the West, to allow expression, as long as it is not disruptive. He is a staunch conservative by all appearances, at least from our vantage point in the Western hemisphere.

The habit of personal discipline is a trait that takes time to build in any society and only by long insistence can these traits be expected to exist in the Free Market system-you have to train the performers well before they can appear in the circus where their true talents can become visible to all the world-for even freedom must  have form, just as all good games, must have rules.

Battles against the Russian Oligarchy

Putin’s  first major battles were to be with the powerful capitalists,  the so called Russian “Oligarchy” which had laid claim to most of Russia’s wealth, and he was to somehow bring them into law and order however he could. Once again, his experience at the property management office could not have hurt his cause.

A long story short, he cleaned up the Russian Business Oligarchy(in most ways), bringing them under the control of the nation, but at the cost of leaving them with substantial power, money, and influence. The so called “grand bargain” between Putin and the “Oligarchy” left the capitalist elite still very powerful and rich, but managed to channel that power and wealth into the legal system of the nation. Perhaps we should say here that in all democracies there will be those few wealthy elite who direct large sums of money and resources to wherever they have to go,  but making certain that ultimately the nation is enriched by these elite capitalist elements, and not undermined, is an absolute requirement for the stability and vitality of a nation. In the end everyone must serve the nation to some extent, even the elite, and if they fail to do so, they too are ultimately expendable-or they must be rehabilitated, which is what Putin managed to do.

The Russian Federation

Russia has suffered centuries of corruption on all levels, and it was no small task to bring the system into a centralized legal system. Putin’s main objectives here seem again to be the establishment of a working, honest market on the way to an ideal democratic state. However, being pragmatic, or so he seems, there are times when he will himself put into law whatever he feels is needed. For example he did not prosecute Yeltsin on corruption charges probably not so much as an act of loyalty to his former boss, but because it would have consumed too many resources at the time, and the Russian nation was already in deep despair.

At around that same time Putin minimized the power of the various states, making certain that the central government was the absolute political entity in the state, as was the wish of Abraham Lincoln for the United States. On assuming power, Putin very quickly canceled any prior agreements with the federated entities within the Russian state. Putin believed in the absolute authority of the Federal Government and intended to make certain that this power was not in any way usurped or minimized by any particular coalition of Russian states.  In most ways he had little choice but to pull all states to a center authority,  if he was to maintain the Russian state at all, remembering that this state was still in its formative period.

The Russian Federation consists of some eighty smaller states with differing populations and ethnic groups. Keeping a nation like this, with so large an area together,  was not going to be easy under any system other than a strong centralized Union. Any attempts at a true federation would have probably resulted in disaster for Russia,  fragmenting the nation into small unsustainable elements that would have quickly found themselves at war with one another-it would have sent Russia back to the stone age.

His actions in the West

In his dealings with the West Putin has been forthright but tough and pragmatic. If we remove the propaganda that we are daily bombarded with by private interests we see that Putin for the most part was as honest as he could have been.

When it came to Georgia, his partner Dimitri Medvedev chose to invade and occupy two rebellious Georgian states that had declared their independence from Georgia. But the real reason behind this military move, something not usually mentioned in the press,  was that the Georgian president of the time, Mikheil Saakashvili,  began to entertain the notion of making Georgia a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO).  The Russians have in the two world wars lost nearly fifty million lives. There is absolutely no question as to why they would not want a hostile nation on their border, especially since that whole region is unstable and prone to turn against Russia. Allowing Georgia to turn to NATO gives Armenia and Azerbaijan the same right and tendency, something that would get NATO all the way into the Caspian sea from NATO member Turkey.  The Russians were not likely to let that happen as this might entail NATO ships touring the Caspian sea.

This was the strategic reality at the time,  and all one would have to do is look to the history of Russia to see why it is that Joseph Stalin himself decided to occupy many of the Eastern European nations. It is well understood that after the German invasion the Russians wanted a buffer between them and their violent neighbors, the Europeans who have thrice invaded Russia with catastrophic consequences for the Russian people. These historic realities may be softly impressed on Western minds, but its not that way with the Russians, who had to endure those slaughters.

The same pretty much goes for the Ukraine. It is not that Russia wants the Ukraine so badly as it does not want the Ukraine to become a threat to Russia. The idea of Right wing extremists of the same mind as Adolph Hitler creating a nation hostile to its neighbor, and armed and supported by the power and might of the United States and Europe did not appeal to Putin. There is no mystery here. What’s more is that in both cases there was little strategic choice for Putin-either act to stop this before it gets out of hand, or explain to one hundred fifty million angry Russians why a troubled partner and sister nation, as the Ukraine is most often viewed by Russians, was allowed to turn into a hostile threat on the Western border. There was nothing presentable in having right wing extremists establish a threatening nation on the Russian border.

Too often free nations who have internal economic problems produce self serving political elements that get the idea that they can auction off their own nation to the highest military bidder,  using their strategic geographical location as currency.  It was a lucrative idea for Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia and the right wing extremists of the Ukraine to offer to move their respective nations to NATO with all military benefits, but this was seen as a direct threat by the Russians. It might have even been seen as a direct insult-in the latter case- considering the slaughter endured the last time an extreme right wing government invaded Russia.

The Russians could care less if either the Ukraine or Georgia were to develop economic ties with the West, in all probability they would actually welcome this, but this was not the problem. It was unlikely that the Russians would sit back and allow NATO military ties to develop as the underlying price for the western economic support, and this is exactly why Russia is involved in either of these nation’s internal divisions. It is true that in Ukraine there are ethnic Russians to be considered as well, and some Russian loyalists were also to be found in Georgia(not forgetting that Joseph Stalin himself was from Georgia.) But the true reason for the military actions on these nations is that the Russians considered them a military threat, and a nation that has lost so many lives in recent history would not be expected to tolerate any threats of this kind if they can negate them using careful military interventions. In both cases we can see that the Russians have tried to make minimal incursions with minimal collateral damage.

The truth here seems to be that the present leaders of the West do not know the history of Russia, or don’t respect it, but either way that does not seem to us to be a flaw of Putin’s. The West is plagued through and through with special interests. This is the price that all of us who live in the West pay for freedom. These special interests will often develop ideas and objectives that have little in stride with the common good and very often will  easily sacrifice large portions of a free nation’s wealth and resources to achieve a special objective of interest.

Putin, to his credit, has stood against the unbridled licence given to special interests. He has spoken against it, and has opposed it openly at times. Though the leaders of many nations in the West profess their loyalty and love of the people they are supposed to be serving through representation you would not know this by their actions. Five wars later and the Obama administration is still fighting in the Middle East as if the United States and its people have endless resources to spare so that a few special interests can have their way.

Yet the United States is deeply in debt, its economy is buckling even as the Federal Reserve is spewing trillions of dollars into the economy, though credit is endless and nearly unregulated, and the cost of this, still not visible, is huge and will come to be called up to account in the coming years-you cant just turn the Federal Reserve loose and not have consequences or a price to pay for those actions. Yet we have no end to any of this in sight, rather, there are endless calls for escalation!

These acts of special interests are mostly not in the interest of the American nation as a whole, no more than they would be for the Russian nation if they were taking place there. Yet while Putin, descended from a people having long and terrible experience with the deleterious effects of allowing special interests unbounded free reign with a nation’s policies and economy has taken action both local and global to stop this, while  our representatives are still being chosen by the very same lobbies that are time and again usurping the nation’s objectives, both national and international.

Our own nations in the West, seem to have some serious structural infirmities which all too often lead to uncontrollable urges to act, no matter how inappropriate these acts may be; and its these uncontrollable urges which may be most responsible for Putin’s demeanor towards the West rather than any impulse coming from him or his people.

In the end we cannot fully know what kind of character Putin is, we can only guess, but only advise that our leaders be attentive and cautious, as well as courteous to a man who has so much vested interest in the survival of humanity on Earth. This is common sense. The sad part is that our leaders have often acted as if they were dealing with some school boy in their district. Calls to arm the Ukrainian military are the most immature statements that any elected official can make considering what would happen if the Russian’s were to do the same for our “enemies”.

Putin from all accounts we can see is a technocrat, pro-business, pro-democracy, and pro-world community. However he has an aversion for discordant special interests . So much is nearly certain.

If we treat him with reason, he will probably respond with reason, assuming we are honest about it and self contained. Yes he was once a “snitch” and that is something to worry about. Giving him details about your past personal foibles might not be wise if you meet him.

Immigration, News, Publish

A Possible Solution to the Immigration Problem

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The Immigration problem is a danger to our nation. It must be solved or we risk absolute annihilation.
The Immigration problem is a danger to our nation. It must be solved or we risk absolute annihilation.
see news : Jobs Report Comes in at a Great 209,000!

The Immigration problem must be solved now, or else..

On the one hand you have statements like : “ours is a country of immigrants”

On the other: “ours is a country of legal immigrants”

and : “freedom for all”

and  then..”we are a nation of laws“,

Yet what we really have is a serious problem that must be solved if we are to go forward.

Be certain of one thing before you read this proposal. Nothing is easy, nothing is free, nothing comes without some pain and sacrifice and there is always a cost, even for the very best of times. The solution we see is not going to be liked by everyone, in fact it may not be liked completely by anyone at all, but then this is what democratic process is about, this is what civilization is about, therefore compromise and a maximal solution to a difficult problem. This is the best that can be hoped for.

We must understand that everyone is in some way dissatisfied today with the state of the undocumented aliens. The reason is, as we will make clear in this writing, that the problem of immigration has come upon us not because we asked for it, but because a few people saw great profit in it, and where there is an incentive, there is always someone eager to take action, good or bad for all the rest.

As things stand now, everyone is suffering, both the ordinary American people whose resources are indeed being drained endlessly, though they never asked or wanted anymore people in their land, and also the undocumented aliens themselves, who live in a land where they are seen as intruders, and invaders, and where often they are used, and abused, by those who seek to make the greatest profit off their labors and dreams. Many of these people live life in the fringes, and for many, coming to America was more a tragedy than a fantasy come true. They came to a land that in the end did not accept them as anything but intruders, interlopers, and criminals. The vast majority were not hoping for that.

What is clear is that all of these people who are now designated as illegal aliens, or undocumented aliens,  have never been really accounted for, and that is the real problem behind the problem. These people have had no special care to process their needs, no real adaptation, and no real conscious effort to assimilate these new comers into our society in earnest for both their benefit, and ours. There has even till this day, even by the best intentioned towards the undocumented aliens, never been a call to make them “Americans” as Americans, and therefore to process them fully and completely into the new land, complete with language and culture. This is a fundamental mistake that if ignored will only result in destruction of the worst kind for all involved. This lack of care and attention has of course had dire consequences on the nation as a whole already, as we can all see. There has been an obvious overuse of our infra-structure, far beyond its intended use, and in general little has been impacted positively.  But this can become far worse going forward if nothing is done.

Clearly some reasonable, even if tough solution must be sustained if the nation is to heal properly. It will be painful for all to be sure, but without this sacrifice, nothing good will happen. Only more disturbance, more degeneration of infra-structure, more uncertainty, and very surely more anger and social instability. With the problems we have already, the last thing we need is more instability and division. The nation cannot take any more.  The time has come for a solution to the present immigration problem. We cannot afford any more delays. A realistic attitude is absolutely necessary here if we are to go forward. It will not be easy or comfortable for anyone.

The situation as it  is now

The nation is entering a critical phase in its development. The United States now has a critical population number and the time for fantasies has come to an end. At 330 million people the United States can no longer afford to think of itself as an expanding nation with the need for more people to work endless reserves of natural resources. The truth is we are now overweight rather than underweight and our natural resources are not enough to satisfy the needs of our existing population. All we need to do is look at the seven hundred billion dollar a year deficit in trade-on average- to understand that we are no longer an underweight nation with more resources than we need. We are an overweight nation that has grown too fat in too few years for our own good, and the last thing we need is to get any fatter.

In fact we really don’t have as yet a good understanding of just how much natural resource we need to import at this population level because we have not fully acknowledged just how many people we actually have living in the United States at this time.

This is especially true since those undocumented aliens who entered the nation over the past thirty years have yet to be processed officially. In reality we don’t even know who these people really are since they have been invisible to the government for most of this time. We do not really know what they do for a living nor how they themselves are adjusting to life in the United States since no official reckoning has been at hand. Thus we know little about them and their actual acclimation to the social order of the United States, and even less as to how much resource they are in need of to maintain a healthy productive life. They are legally “invisible”.

This is a difficult problem, since it makes it hard for us to know just exactly what the state of our nation really is as a whole. To say this is a dangerous situation but not immediately critical would be underestimating the potential for serious problems to materialize quickly and unexpectedly-something that happens after a serious problem has been allowed to go unchecked for a long time. An  extremely complex modern nation that does not have a full measure of its population is a nation playing roulette with a partly loaded gun. Any number of developments can result in serious and sudden calamities that can result in catastrophe overnight. But, because these people are now invisible to the law, and because there is much dispute and coercion of facts, we are at present not certain just how large our nation is, nor how it’s behaving in reality, or what the true morphology of this population really is. Yet any well ordered nation must know these things if it is to prosper.

We should understand and admit that the size of a nation is important. How large a nation is, how complex, how dynamic its economy, how dynamic its social structure, how complex its government and regulatory apparatus is to establish the foundation of knowledge concerning that nation’s ultimate function and prognosis. There are a few studies here and there to be sure which ask questions of size and complexity and economy but there is little consensus on how large a nation can become or how long it takes a growing nation to adjust to new growth. We have not as yet really made these questions important in public. We have not yet dared ask the question how large can our nation get before its prosperity is in jeopardy?  The assumption is that there are no natural limits, but that’s obviously absurd! Everything has a natural limit given a set of parameters, like population for example, or rate of growth.  Yet we stand nowhere near understanding what those limits are in reality.

All we know is that we have grown very large over the past thirty years, mostly due to unregulated immigration. We have little knowledge of who these people really are who make up this extra population in reality since officially they are invisible. All we know is they are there, we see them, we work with them etch. Nor has there been any questions of what exactly is expected of these people. They are there, they will be there, and let’s hope for the best is about the best answer on record. Or an eventual let’s make them legal, or let’s get rid of them. Little in between. But this is absurd. These people are now an integral part of the nation they must be processed somehow. There is really almost no debate on how to acclimate these new-comers as yet, only if they should stay or go, while in reality they have been here for decades, and still keep coming. Yet these are ultimate questions that will determine our viability as a nation going forward.

To make things a little more transparent we might word these questions as follows: How large can a nation become? What are the natural limitations of size? How must the circulation of money work relative to population size? How complex and efficient must the infrastructure be relative to population for a nation to be viable? Specifically these questions must be asked of each nation in question. Is it even possible for the United States to have a population of 330, 340, 350 million people without suffering detrimental structural damage to its fundamental institutions, culture and infra-structure? Were these institutions designed with such population numbers in mind in the first case? All of these questions have really been ignored in the public debate concerning undocumented immigration and therein lies the most serious problem here.

The problem with un-regulated immigration is that no one plans for its ultimate impact.

The real problem with uncontrolled immigration is that there are no pro-active procedures taken to accommodate the new-comers since they are not “expected” or admitted formally in the first place. Therefore, the new-comers that have reached the United States were never planned for, never adjusted for, never was there a calculation taken as to their actual requirements, or impact on the general well being of the public. This is critical. There is really no excuse for this. A nation that simply allows people to enter without taking steps to accommodate and acclimate those new-comers once arrived is playing with its own viability, with its life, and with the life of its citizens. This is especially true of the modern gigantic nations that we see today whose resources are limited by the enormous demands of their citizenry.

Even in ancient days it was well understood that there are limited resources and limited accommodations for any given nation. Yet today, in our own time of extreme technical complexity and maturity of human ideas we have embarked on an unplanned immigration that’s really akin to an unplanned pregnancy for an unwed young girl. No calculus was established for the arrival of all these people in a space of less than three decades, and little to no infra-structure improvements were made. There was as we have already said, no established calculus as to how large or how fast a modern nation can grow in a given space of time. In reality, there was no real objective analysis done on the true impact of such migrations at all. No one seriously asked the question of whether these migrations were actually good for civilization or bad. The truth is they profited large industry and this was enough! But it isn’t enough, as we are now seeing.

Therefore the actual costs of assimilating these new populations was never even considered. No one bothered to ask what impact these new people would have on a nation the size and complexity of the United States. Instead a wink wink policy of legal/illegal immigration was substituted with absolutely no consideration for the ultimate impact on the nation or its people, those already present, or those coming in. The politicians played political paddle ball between the yes and no versions of the immigration issue only to fully cooperate with the captains of industry on the side who were after all their primary political sponsors and without whom the vast majority of politicians stood no chance of being elected at all.

Yet this is an injustice to all involved. This is an injustice to the established population which has had to bear the impact of the new arrivals with no added support or adjustment, and this is an injustice to those people who came here thinking they would have better lives, but who in most cases are living depressed lives marginally adjusted or accepted or accounted for. In the end the receiving nation has mostly been left in a state of disarray because no real adjustments were made for the new comers. Let’s be honest, when East Germany was united with West Germany at first there was a happy party, but then when the costs came up the party died down real fast and rancor soon followed. New populations need new infra-structure, and need a vast expansion of resources. This costs large amounts of money that has to be paid by someone. In most cases this money was never paid, never expended in reality. There was a benefit to a few, but these generally did not assume responsibility for the costs of such expansions, and therein lies the rancor!

The American public is not angry simply because they don’t like other people. They are angry because the impact on their way of life is not being acknowledged and not being accounted for at all. Let’s not simply say that the American people are just racists, or evil, or mean because this is not true. The vast majority are unhappy with the issue for very real reasons. Their way of life has been severely impacted. Their very culture has been impacted and these are real causes for their anger. On the other hand it is not as if much good has happened with the undocumented aliens either in most cases.

Today , there are reports of slavery, child prostitution, and low wage labor among many unfortunate new comers. There are also many homeless aliens who wind up not being able to adjust to life in a new nation where there is no official support system. All this adds to the general lower quality of life for both undocumented aliens as well as the normal population. In most cases the “illegal aliens”  are still a phantom people with little to no real legal status. They are, for the most part left on their own, and there too often nothing very beneficial comes out of it in general, although some successes still occur. Yet little else can be expected : they are in fact invisible to the law. For the most part, especially on a federal level, they do not exist.  They are “illegal”.

We must first account for the new-comers already here before allowing anymore

The blunt reality is that we have not done anything to process these new comers at all. They are there, they work, they live, they have a significant impact, often significant cultures,  but the law says they are not there, do not exist, do not have an impact, and so no new infra-structure or regulation can be made for them. Of course, the popular argument is that they should not be here in the first place! They have according to most no right to be here at all. They came here illegally and without a formal invitation! But if that’s so, why are they still here? If they are invaders, why then did the U.S. government not eject them immediately? Again, this is the fundamental problem. These people have yet to be accounted for at all! This is why they are here, this is why they have become a problem at all. The government has in fact done nothing to stop this migration, and in fact has often actually promoted it, or at least private industry has by giving these people jobs and a way of living, sometimes prospering here. The government has in reality allowed this to happen and we should not in any way be fooled by the intention of the government. The intention was to allow them to come, and it was so from both the Democratic side and the Republican side. Both parties in reality allowed these people to come here, and both sides wanted them here because the power brokers of both parties had a great deal to gain by having them here.

A general principle which is inviolable: A Nation has a right to determine who enters into it.

This is not to excuse the actions of those who came here. Those who came in most cases knew what they were getting into. They knew that the native populations in most cases were not going to be accepting or welcoming, but they came here to struggle on and attain wealth. This cannot be glossed over and should not. It cannot. In their defense it should be noted that the vast majority felt that they were offering their work and if their offer to work was accepted then they should be allowed to stay. Most of those who came knew that the nation was in fact divided, or else compromised. That these individuals sought to exploit that compromise cannot be ignored and must be addressed in any attempt to assimilate and ultimately integrate the new comers into the general society. To ignore the intentions of these people on their way here is to lay down the seeds for endless differences and divisions that will only hurt the nation. The time has come for some reconciliation and an acceptance of responsibility.   If we are to accept that a group of people entered this nation on the idea that they were here to take advantage of inherent weaknesses within the nation without reconciliation and some eventual atonement, we open up a whole new level of division that may last for centuries. It will be impossible for the new comers to be assimilated without first acknowledging the breach, and in some way answering  for it.  If this is not done, then we will introduce a basic division which can only work against the nation, and against the new-comers themselves.   This they will have to acknowledge in order for the American people to accept them as legitimate residents eventually.  Once this is done, then they can be judged honestly and everyone can go forward. Still the point is that the problem needs a solution immediately and that we have to go forward, this is what is important to everyone.

 For as long as there remain unprocessed undocumented aliens in the United States, the government is illegitimate.

Yet when we look at the problem from the highest levels we cannot but affirm that the ultimate failure was with our own government  The government of the United States failed. It failed to represent the law as it was and instead played games for the benefit of the few and is now in trouble. The government of the United States, in allowing this problem to grow to these proportions has in fact compromised its authority. There is a question as to whether the government of the United States is at this time legitimate, or worthy of continuing to govern.  If the American people were to come to the conclusion that the government now present is itself illegal and illegitimate they would be right and justified. There is no way to justify the breach that was allowed to happen for so many years. A simple law forbidding the hiring or harboring of undocumented aliens could have stopped all this immediately. Such a law was never passed, and never prosecuted. In this respect the government undermined its own legitimacy. The government we have today is compromised for this reason and for as long as this problem remains unsatisfactory in the eyes of the American people. The United States, no matter what anyone might claim, is now a nation without a truly legitimate government and that’s the ultimate danger a nation can face.

One man voiced the situation as follows-if illegal aliens are allowed to break the law, why shouldn’t the rest of us? In effect there is no law, no government no order until such time as this problem is solved. Ignore this, and the nation ignores the immigration problem at its own peril. In reality we are now in a state of instability.

For as long as these people already here are not processed the government of the United States continues to be illegitimate. The government of the United States must first acknowledge they are here, and then begin to treat the problem as needed, as required by Law. In this present state of limbo the American people are in fact given a de facto illegitimate government. It has allowed its borders to be breached and did nothing about it. It has allowed people who are not here lawfully to stay here without in anyway addressing their problems. It has failed in every way to maintain the law of the land and the constitution by so doing. It has repeatedly and insistently failed to represent the American people and for as long as the situation remains unaddressed the situation can only get worse and the illegitimacy of the government ever clearer. This is especially true when there continues to be a breach of the border where the government of the United States is allowing Mexico to collude with aliens further to the South and delivering them to the American border and having the government of the American people fail to insist on stopping this.

If the American people were to conclude under these circumstances that they are not being represented by this government they would be absolutely right. It is the president’s duty to protect our borders; if his administration is failing, or if the congress is failing to make that clear to him through the passage of laws he can enforce, then by implication both are illegitimate. There is no other conclusion possible here. Sooner or later the American people will put two and two together here and act on this. For this reason it is absolutely necessary that the government of the United States immediately act to rectify this problem by first addressing and then assimilating those people already here, since there would be no way of removing them without great turmoil and disruption. The U.S. government must act to stabilize this nation, and restore its immediate authority over its borders, or face a possible revolution and overthrow.

But nothing at all can be done until these people here are fully acknowledged and fully accounted for. That means that everything else must stop until such time as these people are processed and made part of the United States. The government must proclaim its authority and repair whatever inconsistencies that remain concerning the immigration policy and its legal implementation. It must therefore deal with the problem of undocumented aliens already living in the US before it can ever again bring in anymore.

The nation has to assimilate these new comers if it is to go forward

The nation is now a relatively large structure which has so far under-supplied itself when dealing with the extra stress that 330 million people will put upon it. This is why many Americans today are in fact complaining. We have neither the schools, nor the hospitals, nor the roads, nor the cities, nor the jobs, nor the proportional wage distribution,  nor the general infrastructure required to house the number of people we have within our borders at present. And contrary to what is sometimes offered, there is no easy way of downsizing our population. There is virtually no chance of becoming a smaller nation, no chance of asking all these people to leave in other words. Those people that are here now, are not likely to leave in any great numbers. Trying to force this issue would of course be catastrophic and quite disruptive in itself and again result in the destabilization of the present government. For this reason the time has come to make certain that the nation adjusts fully to this much larger population than we had in the 1970’s and begin to fully compensate the infrastructure required for this much larger population. But this absolutely and irrevocably  demands that nearly all immigration be suspended from this point on with no possibility of amendment until all the present population is fully accounted for and fully processed. That means no new immigration of any kind for decades,  until all new stresses as a result of the increased population, and the government failures that allowed this to happen in the first place,  have been fully compensated for, and fully corrected!

Undocumented Aliens must first become Temporarily Visible to the law

But before this can happen, before we can begin to assimilate these people we must first acknowledge their existence. We cannot simply say that they are sometimes here and sometimes not. We must know who they are, what they are doing, what must be done in their individual cases, and what pro-active structural changes must be effectuated in order to make the nation productive enough, and able to house these people, or to house that segment of the undocumented population that will be allowed to stay.

This can only be done if these people are made visible to the law by granting a temporary legal status to all of them. Only then can actions be taken concerning their individual status. It will not likely be possible to allow all such people to stay immediately. The reaction from the American people may be unpredictable and volatile and this should be respected.  However, once all undocumented aliens are made visible to the law the process of assimilation can begin in earnest.

A general unconditional amnesty is not possible

No one should believe that there will be a general and unconditional amnesty. This is not possible due to the antipathy of the American people. After thirty years of informal entry into the United States too much damage was done to the quality of life for most Americans, as well as to the underlying standard of living. There has been a general shock to the public. The impact has not been a rosy happy go lucky affair in most cases. Unfortunately much crime and disorder, and cultural shock has also come along with the new-comers, as can be expected with any new arrivals and large migrations, but in this case was much amplified and made worse by the lack of fore planning and pre-adjustment required whenever large increases in population are allowed. For many Americans the impact has been a bad one and for this reason there is extreme anger and resentment in many areas. This alone will make it difficult to simply white wash the matter without danger of extreme and fundamental reaction, something this nation cannot afford with a debt of 17-20 trillion dollars already hanging over its head. Whatever solution is offered will have to be a well thought out one, with large concessions made to the American public. The American public will have to be convinced that the solution was both reasonable and justifiable in order for any solution to be successful

It is not possible to forcibly remove the undocumented aliens and Americans should understand that

There will be some who will insist that all these people must be made to leave the second anyone proposes making the aliens visible. But this is impossible and would only result in catastrophic damage. It would involve riots, and violent clashes and tremendous instability would be generated that might well result in a civil war that would send our economy and society to the depths of hell itself. So it is not possible for anyone to seriously ask that all, or most of these people leave. It’s not possible without massive destruction. The only reasonable recourse is to make these people temporarily visible in all cases, while their individual cases are examined in detail. There a general process can be applied to each case individually to the optimum benefit of the nation. Those who have established themselves well and show viability will be allowed to stay. Those that have resorted to crime of course will not. But in the end the vast majority will stay, and will eventually be allowed citizenship,  but with the guarantee that there shall not be anymore new immigrants until all the new comers are fully assimilated into American society, and this will take decades. The solution will in fact be final.

There will be a price and this price will involve guarantees that no new illegal aliens will be allowed to work, or live in the United States after the settlement is achieved. Once a temporary legal status is granted to those already here, it will be required for all previously undocumented aliens to have papers in order to work, or rent, or exist in the  in the United States.  In effect this will close down any new immigration after that. In the end some price must be paid. If not then the situation just continues to get worse.

If the borders are not closed, and if papers for work and rent are not required after the settlement, then the first wave of undocumented aliens will have entered into an unstable situation and will have joined the rest of the American population in full jeopardy of their rights. It would mean that these new Americans would eventually see their jobs taken by yet others, and their standard of living compromised by every new wave of undocumented alien. Why should a company hire a new legalized alien for full pay when it can hire a new illegal alien for half that pay? The problem would get geometrically worse!

As to the American people, if we failed to finally guarantee the sovereignty of their land, then we are in effect expanding the existing problem to ever worse proportions.  Forcing the American people to accept all the new comers without some guarantee of later stability and national sovereignty will probably result in a destructive reaction that no one will want to live through. The American people must be satisfied that a price was paid, and that their tax dollars are spent justly, and that what is theirs is theirs and that the law exists and understands that. There is no other way but to close all future unregulated immigration, and severely curtain regulated immigration for decades. There is no other way to solve this problem.

The American people deserve a solution to this problem

Some say that we need specialized labor from abroad, but this is just an attempt to keep the door open towards the erection of a Slave State

Recently a group of wealthy billionaires took to an op ed in the Times where they insisted that the nation needs specialists from abroad and that the nation would suffer without them.  The United States produces some of the best trained professionals in the world. There is no nation that has a superior higher education system than our own. It is unreasonable to assume that a much poorer nation can produce a superior system to our own with the relative lack of funds ,experience, and technology. It is also dangerous. We need our professionals to be of the very highest grade and have the most supreme education possible. This can only be achieved in the United States and if for any reason at all this is not happening, then we have a critical problem which must be addressed immediately if this nation is to survive. This is the worst of time for incompetence. This argument proposed by these billionaires will only result in cheaper professional labor for their industries but will not in any way profit the American people. If there is a profession required, the American people easily have the wherewithal to supply that professional requirement given the right incentives. If that requirement is not there, then something terrible is amiss somewhere since we have the most technologically superior civilization on Earth. Something somewhere has been grotesquely corrupted and it should be corrected now.  If indeed we are not producing the professionals required, then we must do what must be done to produce them immediately and not resort to importing such requirements.

We must at some point in time begin to understand that all our actions have consequences. We cannot live in a perpetual national fantasy for the benefit of a few people at the top. The illegal immigration phenomenon has profited the few wealthy elements who are the primary owners of business and real estate. In effect the admission of so many aliens unprocessed and unaccounted for has resulted in a severe suppression of wages for the entire population. Wages have consistently failed to register gains in the United States and this has been one reason for the struggling economy. Should these conditions remain unresolved, and if indeed illegal immigration continues to be allowed,  we as a nation face the danger of a possible slave state where a few people at the top echelons of society have nearly complete control of the rest. This is not a small danger but a substantial one. There is little question but that money and connection are what run the politics of the United States. As more and more people see lower and lower wage growth, and as the population is diluted in principle and cultural determination, effects which have always been the result of large influxes of new immigrants, there is the danger that only a determined few at the top will have control of the nation. Indeed there are indications that this is the case to a large degree even now. For this reason, the immigration problem must have an ordered proportional solution and the nation will not be able to continue without it.

Summary

The reality is that we are a democracy and intend to fully remain a democracy. We have no intention of relinquishing our freedoms, nor are we at any time going to dissipate our individual rights as citizens of the United States so that a few select people at the top can live a privileged life style . Yet, for the past thirty years our rights as a people have in fact been ignored. The nation was allowed to balloon to a population that we were not prepared for, and our standard of living and quality of life had for this reason degenerated in as far as the vast majority of people in our nation are concerned. This failure is due almost solely to the controlling elements at the top of the power structure of our nation. They have allowed for a vague loose immigration policy that suited their own financial, and political needs for more power and prosperity while ignoring the needs of the majority of Americans. The average person’s  quality of life,  and standard of living has been allowed to grotesquely degenerate so that the few at the highest levels of society could live extravagant lives due to the increased product demand emanating from our unstructured immigration policy. All the while wages have been suppressed due to the availability of cheap labor. Therefore those who held the greatest interest in the economy benefitted wildly while the rest of the population, which is the vast majority,  has suffered the consequences. This cannot continue if the United States is to remain a stable nation. If these inefficiencies are not addressed immediately there is almost no question but that instability will very soon erupt and once begun will not be stopped easily. Once a large segment of the population declares its distrust in the government and acts upon this, there will very little that will dissuade that population from returning to normal. This process is probably an imminent event, and the various random shootings are likely the harbinger of things to come if something is not done quickly to take control of a situation that is degenerating by the day.

In the end, the vast majority of new-comers will stay, of this there should be no question,  but there will be no others behind them until such time as the nation can actually afford them, or absolutely requires them and these can only be admitted legally and under strict regulation. This will take many decades of assimilating the present group and at some tremendous costs.

When everything is done however, these new comers will have become part of the American nation and be fully integrated and prosperous. The road might be hard won, but in the end there will be success, assuming the sovereignty of the nation is ultimately acknowledged and defended.

No Unilateral action by the President on this issue

It should be added that there has been talk of Obama taking unilateral executive action concerning the immigration problem. This could be suicidal. The American people are going to have to understand what happened, and are going to have to be convinced that this was a just solution that is ultimately in their interest and especially in the interest of the nation going forward. The president can not accomplish this task alone. He may believe the media will assist him in his effort to convince the American people that the right thing was done. But, there is tremendous distrust of the media, and the media cannot be relied upon to convince anyone of the justice of this particular executive action. There will be a reaction  and this could make a bad situation much worse very quickly, especially since once again the economy is not well.  The American people are largely uncertain of the nation going forward, adding this kind of executive action to a critical problem like this can only make the citizenry even more apprehensive and more likely to act up.

The best course of action is for the congress to take the matter up in January of 2015. Then a newly elected congress can begin to plot a just course of action for the issue of immigration. This can be finished before the end of 2015 and thus take any pressure off the next election cycle. The congress must be careful to understand that any solution will require that the American people are compensated and that they accept that compensation as just and that in the end it is best for the nation as a whole, and that it is especially good for the future of the nation. Only the congress has the true authority to pass such a law, and the president should respect that in order to avoid further lack of confidence in government and  a resulting instability.

Publish

Do We Have the Immoral Authority to be an Empire?

To be an Empire or not to be?

To be an Empire or not to be?

Todays News : Jobs are everywhere!

Is the United States Ready to Become and Empire?

It’s June and the US Consumers are out! Recently we have seen the U.S. economy moderately improve. Its June, the weather is hot, people are out and about, and they do what comes naturally to them : they consume. Jobs are on the rebound, and the economy has added some 200,000 jobs a month, give or take a few thousand, on average for the past six or seven months. Since Barack Obama has taken office, the U.S. economy has recovered the vast majority of jobs lost after the Bush presidency. The general climate seems to be such that consumers are spending money, and money seems to be circulating.  All of that is true, and good, however, there are still some big questions around.

 are companies inflating their own stock?

One of these most important questions is how long will this economy go on rebounding?  We can see that the present economic rebound, though somewhat sunny now at the beginning of summer, has really not been all that sunny overall for the past few months. The fact is that even as recently as last month the economy contracted. Not by much, only one one tenth of a percentage point, but still that is negative territory and in the wrong direction. So it is clear that our sunny day has come out of the darkness of winter.  But leaving the weather aside, there are some very serious problems that affect the fundamental nature of our economy that will not go away any time soon.

 where are my comments?

There is a general problem with our thinking it seems.  We hear the good reports about the economy, but we never hear anything about the problems that its facing.   The US economy has some of the biggest debt in the world, and it’s growing ever bigger. Yet, there is little talk about it. Moreover, the economy is at full blast with credit spigots opened about as far they can possibly be opened. This is not normal in any way. In fact never before has the United States ever had to face an extraordinary situation so extreme as the one we’re in today.   Do we intend to go on in this way? If we do, the problems facing us are going to be huge! The reason is that not only does the actual reality not suggest that we are ever going to normalize our economy, but the will to do so is obviously lacking. It’s as if we have really given up on ever becoming a normal economy again. No one is even talking about becoming a normal net exporter for example, or of ever really becoming debt free, or even ever trying. It’s as if somewhere in the power broker’s vast complexes of unbridled wealth, they have made the decision that this nation is never going back to a normal nation economically. As if we are going to stay in this all out credit boom forever, regardless of ever being able to pay anything back. There is even the suggestion that if need be, the Federal Reserve can always introduce another Quantitative Easing Cycle(which by the way it never really left), which only translates to even more borrowing, or a kind of Super-Credit that possibly goes on forever.

 Foreign Affairs Seem Tipped For Nothing Less than Continued Unmitigated  Expansion

There’s also the state of foreign affairs to consider. Recently the news around the world has not been good. But there is little in the news about ever having a peaceful world without violence. Rather it seems as if we are being groomed for a violent unstable world where we are lucky to get what we can. Where the only thing we can ever really look forward to is a nice sunny day once in awhile. Then the storms come back, and the climate change is upon us both as far as the weather is concerned, and as far as our economy, and general state of affairs are concerned.

As we mentioned before, the Ukrainian incident seemed a well planned  move  in a chess match that both the US and Russia understood would happen long before it actually did.  Are we simply styling our foreign policy for an unbridled expansion, or the possible creation of the old “Spheres of Influence” where the most powerful nation’s get to control certain areas, and those areas are then fully absorbed by the controlling nation?  It would seem that something like this is in works. Certainly it would make sense when considering the nature of our economy, and the way in which we have handled near foreign policy and distant foreign policy as in South America, and Asia for example.

Our posture in the Mid East is very well known, but there are disturbing signs that we might be preparing for an expansion into resource rich Africa as well. This will explain the increasing diplomatic activity in the Sudan and other areas of Africa for example.  But all this will take a powerful, fully equipped and very expensive military force. But where’s the money to do this going to come from? Are we preparing an all powerful money making machine to make money available at the touch of a button-on credit of course?  The Fed is just such a machine.

We seem to be heading towards an endless political and economic expansion, but is that what we really want, or is that what a few very powerful special interests want? Meanwhile, aside from the few at the top, the American people cannot be said to be prosperous in general. Most are in debt, with little savings and little incentive to save with rates being around zero.

Can we ever prosper under such a plan? Can we ever go back to being a normal prosperous nation without debts, without wars, without last minute congressional deals to save us from bankruptcy? A nation which lives in peace with other nations in a world that actually gets along. Can we ever see a real change of season where bright and sunny is an everyday occurrence, or at least the norm?

What’s our heading right now? Where are we really going with all this? Can our economy ever fully recover to the point where interest rates are normal, and we can once again save some money for our retirement without having to risk life and limb in a volatile and dangerous stock market? Will we have normalcy sometime in the future or should we just get used to being forever at risk?  And is war going to become an everyday part of our lives? Some signs seem to suggest that this might just be what we are heading for because this is what has been planned for the nation by those who actually have control of it, and that is not the majority of Americans. Meanwhile the American people are becoming increasingly agitated and uncertain, a little noted reality. There is an ever increasing existential doubt that has crept into the lives of all individual Americans and it is showing.

 A Debtor Nation

The fact is we are a habitual debtor nation. We consume much more than we actually produce. This has been the case for so long that there is little reason to think that anything is going to change no matter what happens. Moreover, the general thinking is that we should actually remain a debtor nation.  There are those who are convinced that the U.S. must entangle the world’s economy in order to be able to manipulate it to our advantage.  Thus, instead of discharging our debts and attempting to rectify a serious problem, we have taken to globalization as the destined path. Which is the real reason why Japan and China are now holding some two trillion dollars of our debt as a result of their exports to our nation. This is actually the money we owe them for buying their products!

However, this destined path means we will have huge debts to pay for a very long time, and the only thing preventing our collapse is our military muscle. Indeed, to remain a debtor nation on this level, we do require military muscle. Imagine what would happen if we owed Japan and China two trillion dollars and did not have a military?But of course to have a military, you need even more money!  To be a global debtor you need to have the muscle to stand up to your creditors.

This is the general thinking as we see it today. Borrow huge amounts of money, and give it out as needed to remain a global super power.  And if we don’t have an interested lender, we can just print our way there, by lending infinite amounts of money to ourselves.  We are a global super power, and we can do whatever we want.  But is this really sane thinking?

“Dealing” with our debts.

After the crash of 2008 the plan had become to prevent any further recession by pro-actively stimulating the economy through government spending. At the time, the media experts insisted that  the Japanese economy served as the model of what to do right in a crash and also what to do wrong. The economists making the network rounds , as well as those advising the president(many of whom were Bush Era holdovers) were blazing with insights into the Japanese calamity of the nineties and drew some comparisons between the US crisis and Japan’s and it was unanimously agreed that the Japanese had acted too late in their recession intervention process and this was the reason they were still in dull drums in 2008.  And so the U.S. made the conscious decision that as a blossoming global empire our credit was now infinite and we would be right to simply borrow and inflate our way out of the crash as quickly, and as violently as possible-this even though we had already expanded the global economy to enormous proportions with wide open credit. Many economists of great renown were brilliantly pointing out that had Japan “printed” sooner, by this time she would have freed herself from the pesky recession which still haunts that nation’s economy today. The lending,  borrowing, stimulating, and printing started in earnest and to a degree no one could ever have imagined. Even Allan Greenspan was left in awe after QE infinity came into vogue and Ben Bernanke kept his word that he would in any depression like situation drop helicopters full of money as a cure. Today the debts we have are absolutely enormous, and are never stated publicly. Yet after all this time, just last month the economy contracted again. We are creating money as fast as computers can keep accounts. But is this really going to work? Are we really going to avoid Japan’s fate of endless recession?

Consumption vs Containment : The US and Japan

A little note on the differences between America and Japan might be in order. Japan, and the United States are two fundamentally different nations. To be sure both are very creative, very able nations. Each one has a special gift, each one in its own way a great nation. But there are startling differences too. For one the Japanese are a far more conservative people. They, not having many natural resources, and under constant natural duress due to their volcanic inheritance,  must depend on their labor productivity, and a net export surplus to stay solvent. The Japanese are alive today only because they have been able to produce far more than they consume. They are also savers. Even today, with zero interest the average Japanese family will try to save as much of their money as possible. This is why they are in fact net exporters. They want to be so on an individual level, because they feel they must be to survive as a nation, and as a people.

The American people, on the other hand,  have been conditioned to think differently over the past thirty years, especially after the “trickle down” theories of the eighties. The American people have been groomed to be credit bound consumers who will do whatever they want to do for as long as they can get the money, and this is constantly encouraged and reinforced by both media and government as if it were a matter of national security. The average American, no matter their status, is in the end a net consumer rather than a producer. In part this is because the general economic philosophy has come to be that we must essentially consume the world in order to remain on top of it. With our military power, and our economic consumption, the going philosophy is  such that we give other nations a great incentive to cooperate with our global plan. On the way we encourage other nations to be exactly like us, when in Rome do as the Romans, where our way of being ultimate consumers is the way to be for all nations. A decade ago there were numerous fantastic calls for the Japanese to consume more and that the real problem with our own economy was that the Japanese were not consuming enough, as if they could really ever afford to.  But is any of this sane, much less sustainable?

There is little doubt that the American people are the most versatile people on Earth. Their inventiveness, their industrious nature, and will to win is not doubted by anyone anywhere on Earth. However, the time has come to admit that they may have been misled into believing certain ideas that are not possible. The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. There is little doubt about this. Overall our military is matched by none. We have more weapons, of a greater caliber and capability than anyone on Earth and there is going to be a long period before anyone can match that capability or surpass it. Of this there is no doubt. We are also the world’s greatest economy. We have a GDP that far exceeds the world’s second best. We are a resource rich, intelligent, able and versatile nation of great size and strength that has no peer. There is not anyone who will doubt this on consideration.  But this does not mean we don’t have limitations. The reality is that our limitations are everywhere apparent even if we never hear about them in the Main Stream Corporate Media. When we look at the situation carefully we see a nation at risk in many ways.

 

Immoral Authority

That we are a great nation with unmatched abilities no one can doubt. But we are not an Empire and we are not Rome, nor Britain as they were in their heyday. When the Romans were in their heyday they were like us, the most powerful nation of Earth militarily. There were a supremely organized city state which had managed to appropriate gigantic resources through military superiority, political order, and sheer brutality when necessary. The Romans would march into a city, slay all those who opposed mercilessly, then round up all women and children, and any others who did not fight or surrender that turn them to slaves, literally into property to be possessed and used by her citizens as they wished. Those who were captured during the military conquest were in effect turned into a resource. Thus defeating an enemy back then meant that Rome had just managed to acquire extra resources and turn those resources to actual wealth. There was no mercy, no kindness, no misunderstanding. The purpose was to destroy an enemy absolutely and take their resources absolutely leaving nothing behind. But this is what being an empire really meant. To have absolute authority over the vanquished.

 

Similarly the British, though often perceived as a genial people with a smile always at the ready, were for all that fearsome warriors in their days of empire. Though the British did not use the same direct implementations of social order as the Romans in that Europe had from the start looked down on outright slavery, and human property, the reality was that the British had taken slavery to a new dimension. In those days the British empire fully made use of the captured human resource, and though it added all kinds of devices, and classifications to human slavery, nonetheless the empire fully absorbed all foreign captives and usually in the form of bonded slaves. Though never to be designated as slaves, all those subdued under British rule were given a choice. They would either do as they were told to the letter, or face starvation, imprisonment, or annihilation. After a week of being denied resources, and a British subject being forced to witness his family do without food or shelter, the captured subject would usually be willing to do exactly as he was commanded to do. Of this there should be no question. When at times rebellions would flare the British empire would retaliate absolutely with little in the way of mercy. The rebels were defeated absolutely and without compromise.  In effect the British had acquired the Immoral Authority of an Empire. They believed themselves to be absolutely powerful, and would, if questioned do whatever was needed to extinguish any opposition.

 

Yet as time went by, and human rights began to take form on the European continent and in Britain itself, the moral burden of having an Empire began to weigh heavily on the British. And so slowly other devices were needed such as the construction of local governments for the occupied,  to at least give some kind of representation to the captured people’s. In the end it seemed more efficient to do so anyway as the yield was far greater for an ordered subject state than for a disordered one. But there should be no mistake made here, though efficiency made it clear that attaining your captured people’s good will would be more profitable in the long run, there was no question about who would have the final authority in the British Empire. So it was only through a great deal of violence, or else disobedience(as in the case of India’s Gandhi) that freedom from the Empire was ever attained. And in fact, if not for the damage done during the second world war, it is not likely that Britain would ever have surrendered her captured property willingly  but would probably have elected to manipulate her Immoral Authority in whatever way necessary to maintain her spoils.

 

But do we, here in the United States,  have such an Immoral Authority in us? Over the past fifty years after the Second World War civilization has evolved to look down on empires and their modus operandi. Human Rights Issues have now taken global form and it is not acceptable for nations to enslave one another. Certainly democracy as an entity is fundamentally opposed to enslavement of any kind and inherently supports individual freedom, and rights. In multi cultural, multi ethnic, multi racial democracies these differences are not a standard of inherent supremacy in our times. The so called “white man’s burden” is not an acceptable notion to serve as a doctrine for the attainment of empire. We would think that the United States is least inclined to this kind of doctrine as a nation which has recently elected its first black president.  It would seem incongruous for a nation like the United States to ever seek to develop the underlying philosophy required to ever justify the erection of a true empire.

 

Yet as we see today, we have in fact regressed somewhat. There are a number of examples where we can point to the United States and its allies engaging in discriminatory subjection of foreign nations. Though in Afghanistan and in Iraq the United States has for example managed to build a democracy of sorts on its way out of those nations, the reality is undoubtedly that those nation’s democracies are valid only in so far as they meet our political needs, and the second they fail to meet our needs, and demands, they will cease to be valid democracies, as happened even in Egypt a year in 2012 where the Muslim dominated presidential administration was overthrown by the Egyptian army, which by the way receives some two billion dollars a year from the United States in aid every year.  There are also other cases of democracies not being valid unless they meet certain criteria which we demand they must.

 

But in the end, it is not going to be easy for us to develop the Immoral Authority of Empire. And if we do, even if more and more we see a tendency towards discrimination in the media and government, and a general tendency towards less individual rights than more, it is without doubt that such a trend would ultimately destroy the United States as we know it. It is doubtful that we will ever be able to develop the coarse nature required to attain a true Empire for it would in all probability destroy our own democratic identity.

So we can conclude that we are not like the British, or the Romans, or the Turks, or the Mongols who had in place an Immoral Authority which gave them the undisputed right to disregard any issues of their captives human rights.  And it’s not probable that we will ever attain such an authority democratically. And if ever we did, it would probably mean the end of our society as we know it.  The same degeneration of morality needed to maintain an empire would usually be sufficient to destroy the social fabric of the Imperialist state itself.

 We are not the nation we were in 1945

So it is without doubt that we don’t have the same attributes as the Roman’s or the British and so we are really not able to maintain an Empire in the way they were.  But of course the United States was never an Empire and never did it aspire to be one.  Our present attitudes stem from the history of the Second World war and most of the foreign policy we have today is deeply embedded in the aftermath of that war.  But the reality is that we are not the nation we were back in 1945 just after the war. We are not the nation we were in 1939 before the war. For back then we were a lean, mean, efficient power house nation whose natural defenses had yet to be breached and with resources more plentiful and superior to any other nation on Earth at the time, and with few real debts that we could not overcome easily at the flex of our muscle. Even the Japanese, at the height of their military power,  could only touch us briefly, and then pay a terrible price for that insolence as we were nearly invincible at that point in time, with the technology available at that time. But today, we are vulnerable. Today we do not have the same kind of military superiority we had then and worse yet, we can’t even afford to fight a war like we did then! As great a nation as we are, we are not what we once used to be, and we should admit this quickly, and take the proper action to protect ourselves against any misunderstanding and the possible misstep that we leave ourselves liable for.

 

In 1939 we had virtually no debt, and an entire continent of untapped resources and few global obligations. We had less than one hundred fifty million people, the nation was of a much simpler more efficient order easily able to add another hundred million people before reaching its resource limits. Today we are a too complex, too inefficient nation, with not enough resources for our own consumption, a burgeoning population,  and gigantic burdens and obligations that we really cannot fulfill. This is reality, not the fantasy some would like to dream up and chase down with a martini.  Yes we have a great deal of technology, but we have the costs of that technology too, and others have the same technology. We are not the same nation were in 1939, and certainly not the nation were in 1945 when we came out virtually unscathed from a world war with nothing but a monetary debt that we could easily overcome in a decade. Our people too were quite different. This should not be underestimated either. They were a simpler more direct people with far less demands, and far more likely to conserve some of their abundance than we are today. If we are not the same nation as we were in 1945, why do we think and act as if we are?

 

We may in error go too far

The fact is that as the United States feels the pressure and burden of trying to maintain global order, as a nascent empire,  there is the possibility of going too far in some venture or other. If for example we were to assume control of a foreign situation only to find the control we thought we had was no longer existent, the possibility exists for the start of a proxy war where third parties are armed with the intent of striking any possible target, even domestic targets. Thus if the United States were to assume that it had the political and military control of a given area, say Iran, but in fact Iran were to be decisively supported by say China only because the Chinese no longer accept the authority of the United States, then such a situation could easily spill over into a worldwide proxy war that could very well involve domestic targets inside the domestic boundaries of both nations.  There is no more a dangerous eventuality than either the United States or China, or Russia making the mistake that they are able to control a particular situation when in fact they cannot.

 

Today the Ukraine is a situation exactly like this. The Russians have long assumed that they had control of the area. But, as it has turned out the United States seems to be contesting this. The United States has made the assumption that it can influence political and military outcomes in Russia’s own backyard. This assumption of course stems from the general Bush-Cheney assumption that the United States is now an unfettered global super power which should no longer be bound by anyone else. Not even by a nation with obvious military power on a level that at least in some ways approaches our own. In the past decade the United States has often acted as if it were invincible, but this a very dangerous way to act, especially since we are not.  Again, the question is should we continue along this path? Is this the way to find our successful self-fulfillment in the long run? In the end, this way is probably not even profitable in the short run. Example: Afghanistan. We can say we took control of Iraq’s oil for awhile. But what have we attained in Afghanistan? Nothing as far as we can tell, unless someone had some control of the opium trade, for that was just about the only profitable commodity that Afghanistan seems to have. In the end that war was not profitable, not even in the short run. Our thinking, was erroneous, and we paid for it.

 

Asia is also a situation of very similar regional strategic power characteristics as the Ukraine. The Chinese have long believed that they have dominance over the Korean Peninsula, at least as having control of North Korea. The United States under Bush seemed inclined to challenge this. With the unilateral invasion of Iraq a global message was sent to all that in fact the United States would be willing to go it alone, far from home, even if public opinion abroad was against them. This ultimately resulted in North Korea obtaining the bomb. The Chinese fearing that the United States might move against the North Koreans concluded most probably that it would be safer to allow the North Koreans to build a bomb and thus prevent any possibility of incursion into their space from the United States. Was this another case of overreaching foreign policy and is this what the plan is drawing us toward even now in Asia? Are we planning to overreach our actual authority and our actual abilities?  As can be seen, every mistake we make will have a price tag to it.

 

The United States has painted itself as a global super power dominant in both the financial and strategic areas and has continued to draw on all its resources, and all its abilities to prepare itself for global dominance. But there is very little to justify this philosophy. We are today far from invincible. We do not have even the power that we had in 1939 let alone the power that was once ours in 1950 where this global supremacy doctrine was born. We are not the same nation as we were in 1950 and yet we act as if still think we are. Worse yet we seem inclined to condition our people to think in some ways as if we are the destined airs to the world. We ask our people to consume infinitely, regardless of cost, regardless of credit on the assumption that our credit as super power must be infinite. But in reality it just isn’t. Too many far weaker nations are now doing exactly what we are doing. Simply putting it on their tab. Not only are we overreaching, we seem to be giving the wrong idea to our own people, and even to those nations that actually take us as a role model and would have us be their leader.

 

Empires Need Money

To maintain this global minded philosophy requires a great deal of money. As they say, no money, no honey.  In order for our allies and friends to remain our allies and friends we have to sweeten their  taste buds with our money. That is one reason to remain a consumer nation. But in fact, we don’t have such money, nor do we have any way of ever getting such money. For all the oil in Iraq, in the end even Iraq was a losing gambit which left us with huge debts and great troubles, and it is only a matter of a decade or two before Iraq becomes the same problem it was when Saddam Hussein was in power. It’s  improbable that any of the nations that we supposedly cleansed of old un-American ways is going to remain that way. Neither Libya, nor Iraq, and certainly not Iran are likely to remain problem free. Even Egypt and Turkey require huge amounts of money to remain pro-American. How long do we have before we can’t afford to pay for the pleasure of leading? We have wasted huge amounts of money on causes that are temporary benefits at best.  In the process we have made terrible enemies of billions of people who will not really cooperate with us except under the gun, or with the surrender of a check made to cash. Therefore the lesson is that we can perhaps make a point with our military capabilities, and  money,  but we cannot sustain that point for very long. In the end, we can’t afford it.

 

We can continue to print of course, create money at the push of a button, but it’s only a matter of time before others will simply do the same. Then the obvious consequence of extreme inflation will become a global problem which none will be able to overcome.

 

Has the time come to change course? Has the time come to give up on this idea of global domination and gigantic debt loads that we obviously cannot ever pay back? Is it time to downsize our expectations, and just give up on the notion that we are still the nation we were in 1950?

 

Sail a New Course?

If we decide that in fact we are no longer able to sustain this global network of power and money because it is simply a losing investment, then we must begin facing the realities at hand. The time has come to unwind these debts and obligations and instead try to build a world based on real democratic principles. We must begin to think of a system of mutual trust that rewards nations and people not on their ability to cheat and to get their particular wish but on their ability to live in a principled society. We must destroy the present system of corrupt wheels and deals and start thinking about setting down the foundations of a genuine global society that will survive the next one or two hundred years. To be sure this is no liberal plan. This kind of decision will require some hardnosed decisions and some real honesty and a great deal of sacrifice and pain. But the philosophy must change from the top down and from the bottom up if it’s to have a chance.

 

We must begin to see the American people become savers, and spendthrifts rather than all out consumers. We need to start asking how we might become net exporters and not to remain net importers forever. We must begin to encourage order, and an adherence to fundamental principles and not continue to encourage wild lurid dreams that have no chance of ever becoming a reality, worse yet to become a genuine liability. The time has come for us to turn back to a real conservatism that encourages upright behavior and principled existence instead of what we have now. If indeed the present strategy is not viable, the time has come to start thinking differently before it’s too late. Before we have completely run out of money and authority save but our ability to strike violence against particular targets. For if we come to that point, if we are not already there as evidenced by Iraq, the danger is absolute, and the possible losses limitless. We will be very close to a point of overstepping our abilities both military and political with horrendous consequences looming. The consequences of underestimating our vulnerabilities will be global in nature, and quite possibly result to open violent conflict with those nations which are near in ability to our own. In fact there is the possibility that by behaving erratically we actually encourage other nations to do the same. The final outcome cannot be anything but absolutely destructive.

 

Again, the time has come for a rethink of our priorities, but more importantly a reassessment of  our fundamental way of being. We have today allowed too many special interests to attain too much leverage and power and we have done nothing to balance this out. Although competition among groups is a good thing, as it is among individuals, in the end the game must remain sacrosanct and principled for competition to be productive. We have reached the point where the  fundamental order of our society is in question. This would explain the calls by some, like Ron Paul for example, to return to the constitution which sought at least to put all people an equal footing on conception. Today, there are great imbalances in our society which allow some to drive this nation to attain their most sensational desires no matter how incongruous and unbalanced these desires might be. In the end it is the nation as a whole that must survive and prosper and not a few people here or there.  But whatever the details may be, we should be certain that they will require more order, more adherence to principles than less. If we attempt to simply unify our world without strict, well reasoned laws of interaction and governance, there can be nothing but failure in the wings. To a degree this is what is happening to Europe today. While it’s true that most Europeans wanted unity, they wanted a unity with a highly principled order, not a Hodge Podge of loose legislation that only served the interests of the few who had the most to gain at the moment.

 

If we are to avoid disaster, the time may have come to press the reset button. The time may have come to start anew towards a more highly ordered world that is both capable and honest, and free, and certainly not debt ridden to the point of collapse. In the end, when we put away the fantasies, only the state can grant the rights of individual freedom. In order to have individual freedom, we need a well ordered principled state that is able to create the existential environment required for the true attainment of human freedom. If the state itself is disordered, or unstable, or corrupt the only certainty is that one day a degeneration of individual freedom will evolve as no one will ever want to be part of an ugly fundamentally corrupt state.

 

Global Economy, News, Publish

World War Cyber War is Here!

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World at War CyberTerror
Cyber War World War! Cyber Terror is Here!

We are all under attack!

Here we are in the twenty first century and we live in a great age of new technology. The computer age is upon us and is dominating every facet of our existence. Most of us are highly dependent on our IPhones, or Androids, or Samsungs, or Nokias, that is while we’re away from our main computers at home. And when we are away from them, we are usually at our internet enabled television sets, or when we are away from them, we are our game consoles playing our favorite game, or watching the newest movie. When we are away from all the above, we are sleeping, and usually are not plugged in. But give Google, or Microsoft, or Apple a few more chances and before long we will be wired even while we’re sleeping! However, when we sleep we sometimes see beautiful dreams, but at other times we are liable to see a nightmare. Well, our new found technological bliss is slowly turning into a nightmare in a waking state.

We are at war! And it’s the most general kind of war. It’s a world war Cyber War! My own website is being constantly attacked, I have had two separate break ins, and in fact one guy made himself, or herself an administrator to my own website. Fortunately whoever it was they did not delete my files, or I would not be writing this. However, one thing is very clear to me, nowhere, and no one is safe. For all the money we spend on anti-virus programs and all this extra protection, and all the annoying updates the one truth is that we really can’t protect ourselves from all attacks. Even Norton has to admit that in order to get the worst infestations out, we need their Super Duper Extra Scooper(downloaded separately)  which is supposedly able to erase “even the most deeply embedded viruses” according to them, as well as quite possibly most of your own material on occasion. The reality is that there is no out of the box solution to the Cyber warfare we are exposed to. Indeed of late I have become convinced that all these security companies offer little more but their assurances, and a feeling of well being while in reality they know, and we should know that we are never really safe no matter what they all claim.  Thus we are in reality at the mercy of anyone who wants to compromise our security. But now things are actually worse than they were even a few years ago.

You see, today,  we are in the middle of a world war cyber war.  This war has a number of players. These would be individual hackers from various nations, some criminals, some fancy themselves as do-gooders destroying what they see as a menace to society i.e. Computers, and others are actually soldiers, and secret agents. Yes soldiers and agents working for various governments. You see the United States leadership in its infinite wisdom unleashed a number of spy programs against everyone it saw as a possible threat to its most cherished asset, i.e. the one percent. And in so doing started to spy on everyone, including our allies, and their leaders. A woefully brilliant move if we may say so. The United States spied on France, Germany, Britain, and many more who were supposed to be our allies.  Well no matter what they may have said publicly, there is no doubt that privately they were outraged, or probably just en-raged. They would no doubt respond in kind, eventually.

Of course we had been both spying -and undermining- our enemies systems, like China’s, Russia’s, Iran’s and others all over the world. This does not yet include the mention of corporate spying, much of it with the blessings of the US government. Thus, in the creation of the Global Economy, we also laid down the foundation for World War by daring to undermine the network systems of our fellow Global “partners”.

Then, of course, the NSA scandal broke out where we found out that we, America’s own citizens, are being spied on by our own government and that companies like Yahoo, Google, and Apple and Microsoft are well infested with all kinds of spy bugs whose sole purpose is to keep track of our own interests, and actions on the web. Add to this the I.R.S. scandal, where the I.R.S. went after the ultra conservative tea party for no other reason than its political opinion, and you have a disaster! We, who use computers every day, almost every hour of the day and night, have enemies under just about every mouse click, or screen swipe, or voice command we make! And the Cyber warriors are not at all shy about going after innocent people. In fact, between the soldiers and the criminals, the agents, the ad-agencies,  and our own governments we can safely say that we are the main target of all this Cyber Warfare! We the individual innocent computer users who have done nothing to deserve all this.

Bleeding Heart Virus

Today, a new bug made its way into the global scene and some say it could be a big one. The so called “Bleeding Hear” virus has infiltrated Tumblr and has compromised not only Tumblr, but its users entire array of defenses. Apparently the Bleeding Heart Virus is now able to compromise all networks connected to the original site compromised. This would mean that anyone connected to Tumblr would be compromised as well. So if they get in to Tumblr they can get into any other site you have connected to Tumblr. Including Facebook, or Twitter, or Yahoo. So it would seem. But in reality it may not be that serious since most large corporations do not use OpenSSL because it is Open Source meaning that anyone can work on it. Most will hire other security corporations to handle their security needs and so whatever the Bleeding heart virus may do, it probably will not be bad enough to disable the internet. Although, the truth is that we are on our way to that event.

The fact is that without real cooperation between governments, and between corporations a safe global internet can never happen. The problem we have is that there are too separate standards doing too many things any way they want to.  There are too many corporations writing their own version of the software wheel and it has become so that there is no way to regulate any of these under the present structure. One day Microsoft writes its own language, the next Apple writes its own language and so there is little in the form of a standard which might be used to secure the internet. Unfortunately without a universal standard there is no way to enforce strict rules and security protocol. In order for one company to lay claim to another’s customer, they need to drop their security levels and this is an opening that any hacker can fit right through with little effort.  In fact the Hackers have their own websites and are able to freely communicate with one another. Hackers  may well have more cooperation among themselves, than do Microsoft, Google, and Apple when it comes to security.

No Password is Safe

While the large tech companies try to increase their bottom line, they in effect leave the rest of us open to compromise. Our own governments have failed to set a standard of privacy in their dealings with individual citizens,  much less take an interest in enforcing a strong security standard among corporations.  Any information you give to the internet is in effect going to be available to the world at large and this no matter what the data may be. People are lulled into thinking that their passwords actually protect them from invaders, but this is an illusion. No password is safe because of the way it is kept at the location where the user signs on.

The fact is that any encrypted password will ultimately fail since the encryption needs only the original formula to crack. That is all you need is to know how something was encrypted originally in order to reverse encrypt, or decrypt the password. With so many loopholes set up for the purpose of getting to your cash and mine it is eventually going to be possible for someone to break in at some level and eventually decrypt any passwords on any site or any computer that is linked to the internet. The only possible protection is a standard that in essence restricts the way in or the way out of any secure location. This cannot be done unless it is in effect ordered from the top down.

The reality is that if someone wants to get into your computer or your phone, or your game system, or your internet ready television set, or game console, they can! It’s just a matter of time and effort on their part. Yet, this could be prevented if a standard official security protocol were to be required. Only no one is playing that game, not even our government which has time and again used internet vulnerabilities to compromise the privacy of anyone it sees fit for the task; this has included diplomats, government leaders, and of course the average person time and again. If the government itself is violating our privacy, who would ever expect them to enforce a standard security system?

Does the Government want a Secure Internet?

If our government says it needs to spy on us in order to “prevent terrorism” they would have no motive to ensure a more secure internet. Having a weak internet security protocol  makes the job of the Federal Agent a lot easier since they can use the same vulnerabilities as the ordinary criminal hacker. So why would the government ever demand of corporations to tighten their security? The product that Microsoft makes, or Google, or Apple is by design left open to intrusion for one reason or other. Just as Norton for example will have left itself the ability to “fix your computer remotely” so too might any company that sells you a piece of software on your machine. If the government doesn’t care to enforce a standard of privacy for its own ulterior motives, then what chance does an individual consumer have to secure their own privacy?

We now find ourselves in a world war as just about everyone who was ever attacked by our government’s agencies is now attacking us. The Chinese and Russians, the “terrorists” and the anarchists have made it no secret that they will attempt to compromise any computer system that is in their eyes a “threat” to their own security. That’s fine and dandy, but where does that leave us, the individual, the innocent person who has nothing to do with any of these games that all these entities are playing? The short answer: nowhere. We are here to be eaten by anyone out there who thinks we just might taste good. At the very least I am not going to lie. The reality is that we are never safe.

Can anything be done to keep us safe in the meantime?

However, changing your password often, making it very long including keystrokes like ‘*’ and ‘(‘ or ‘= ‘ with numbers might delay an attacker, or make it harder for them. Making certain that your accounts are well kept, especially since all the tech companies now insist that your account be linked to the internet is a possible obstacle to an intruder as well.  Keeping the number of accounts you have to a minimum and not publicizing them will also help. You should always have complex user names, and never tell anyone what your user name is if you don’t have to. Giving your email address to only trusted sources is another must. Running virus scans from more than one company might also help. For example if you use Norton, then you should also, on occasion use another company to scan for viruses. Sometimes hackers find ways to avoid detection from one company but not from all. So it’s a good idea to sometimes use secondary software to clean up your drives. And of course always keep your software up to date with security updates. For as long as your software maker produces them. Can you trust your software company? Only to an extent. A company is only as good as it’s employee. If an employee decides to compromise your computer off work, there is little your software manufacturer can do about that so even then, keep your computer private as can be, even from your software manufacturer, even from your security provider.

But for all that, we are all vulnerable. Unless the world gets together to stop these intrusions into our privacy by setting tough standards of transaction, there is really no help for it. A word of warning to those engaging in these acts. Sooner or later retribution is going to rear its ugly head. If governments do nothing to stop this, it will only escalate, and there is no telling where that might lead us all to. We can potentially go from Cyber War, to real War.

Economic Principles