The Myth of American Empire

Again and again I run into people on the right and left sides of the political fringe who hold to the bizarre idea that the United States has some sort of international empire because we have troops deployed overseas. While I agree that we have far too many troops in other countries and could save a lot of money in these hard times by bringing some of them home, these deployments certainly don’t seem to fit the characteristics you would expect of troops who are part of an international empire.

The common claim is that we have “700 bases in 130 countries”. That’s almost as many countries as there are member states in the United Nations. Now, the definition of an empire is one nation exercising economic, political and military control over another. If these troops were deployed for that purpose, their role would presumably be to control the governments of those 130 countries, keep the civilian population under control, and protect the vast administrative network of our empire.

Yet if you look at what our troops are doing overseas you see something very different. Conveniently the Heritage Foundation has compiled historical data on our overseas troop deployments. Foreign Policy in Focus also provides some useful information in a recent report.

The first problem is that to get to this popular figure of “700 bases in 130 countries,” you have to cumulatively add up all of the deployments of the last 50 years and count extremely small deployments and minor facilities which are considered bases even when they have no actual military personnel stationed at them. You have to count as “bases” the the contingents of marine guards at 165 US embassies and smaller consular offices and such things as the hundreds military golf courses, movie theaters, post exchange shops and other recreational facilities. In fact, if you count all the facilities considered “bases” and all the embassies you get about 860 bases in 165 countries, so the popular figures are a bit out of date.

The truth is that most of these deployments are not really military in character and at any given time the number of significant deployments is much smaller. 20 men guarding an embassy are not building an empire. When you look at deployments of 1000 men or more, you find that there are currently fewer than 20 countries hosting deployments of that size. When you look at deployments of 100-1000 men you find that there are fewer than 30. So rather than 130 countries with significant numbers of US troops in them there are actually only about 40, mostly in Europe and parts of Asia. What’s more, rather than building an empire, these numbers have been steadily declining, and are about half what they were in the 1950s.

In addition, all of these large deployments are the result of mutual defense arrangements which date back for decades where our troops are there at the invitation of and with the cooperation of the local government. The overwhelming majority of our troops are deployed in coordination with the United Nations or NATO or by arrangement with a few major allies like Germany, England and Japan. In many cases, rather than representing some sort of mythical US empire, they are often deployed on behalf of extra-national groups or programs or working in coordination with local forces.

In fact, a great many of these American troops deployed overseas are not even involved in normal military activities, but are engaged in various humanitarian aid programs. In 2006 the US military took part in 556 relief efforts in 99 countries. These efforts on behalf of various international organizations are a major deployment, but they are hardly empire building. They’re things like aiding victims of natural disasters and distributing food aid and medicine in troubled places like Haiti, Georgia and Somalia. Rather than oppressing these nations with our imperial rule, these missions are enormously popular and poll results in disaster-ravaged countries like Indonesia show a substantial increase in pro-American sentiment as a result of our humanitarian activities there.

Yes, we almost certainly have far too many overseas facilities, too many men deployed outside our own borders and are spending way too much money on these efforts. Right now we have about 400,000 troops deployed outside of the US and only about half of them are involved in peacekeeping in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. Some of the remainder provide support services, but the truth is that we really don’t need 200,000 or more men in Europe and Japan and other friendly countries. In times of economic hardship we could save a lot of money by closing some of those bases. In fact, substantial closures of overseas bases were carried out by the Bush administration and the total number of bases overseas has been reduced over the last 20 years from over 1000 to under 800.

Our overseas military installations and deployments are generally not engaged in anything imperial in character.. An empire is not defined by a bunch of troops engaged in humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and security work. It is defined by economic, political and military control of other countries. To have an empire we would need to be controlling and administering foreign territories, running their governments and profiting from their economies, resources and industrial production. While the United States has a nominal presence in hundreds of countries and troops spread far and wide, with facilities to support them, with the exception of the occasional wartime deployment, the overwhelming role of American forces overseas is to provide aid and support and to fulfill treaty obligations and help our allies. Embassy guards, hospital ships, food distribution centers and golf courses are not conquering or plundering or oppressing anyone.

So by all means, let’s close as many overseas bases and bring back as many troops as we can, but let’s do it for the right reasons, not because of the delusion that the United States is an empire.

Fantasy Jobs?

At President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” Wait a minute. Isn’t the number of jobs actually plummeting? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost more than 1.3 million jobs in the two months after he took office, and it has probably lost at least another half-million in April. The day after Obama spoke, the Department of Labor announced that another 631,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) had filed new claims for unemployment insurance the previous week. So what 150,000 jobs was Obama talking about? It turns out the president’s claim is really an estimate of what his economic advisers think the stimulus bill is doing, and not based on any evidence of its actual effects. We asked the White House for substantiation of Obama’s claim, and a spokesman responded that the figure comes from a recent estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Because the baseline for employment is obviously still strongly downward,” the spokesman told us, “the estimate does not mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 higher than it otherwise would have been.” He said the figure is an estimate of people hired to work directly on ARRA-funded projects, plus “jobs created by the tax cuts, aid to the states, and other parts of the ARRA.” So when the president said his stimulus bill “already saved or created” those jobs, he was just giving an estimate produced by his own economic advisers at the White House. Furthermore, the jobs figure is based on projections done at the time ARRA was passed. Recipients of ARRA spending aren’t required to report until later what they’re doing with the money and how well it’s working, so there’s very little hard data on where the money is being spent, let alone how many jobs may have resulted from the legislation. The CEA incorporated some actual spending reports into its estimate, but that information is not complete.

Aaaahnold for Fuhrer?

When his popularity was running high, people were talking about amending the Constitution so that Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for president sometime in the future. With their current weakened status he might be the only hope for the Republicans in 2012, so a lot of speculation sill focuses on the muscular and thickly accented California governor from all quarters, including the lunatic fringe.

No one sells conspiracy theories better than Alex Jones of infowars.com. He makes Art Bell look like a skeptic and Whitley Streiber seem like the soul of reason. All by himself he out nuts even the vast collection of ultraliberals who think Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections somehow. He’s has a thing about the Austrian Adonis, cataloging every bizarre incident in his past and throwing in some fantastical spin which just about makes Arnold into Hitler’s secret stepson and the chosen messiah of every major conspiratorial organization of the last 2000 years. He stops short of nominating Arnold for Anichrist, but that might be in the next article.

The thing about Jones and other conspiracy fans is that the gates of belief are always open and the filtering system has been turned off. Everything is grist for his mill. It all ties together into one giant fabric of paranoid fantasy. Every little factoid is blown up to its most sinister permutation and the result is a truly unique worldview. From a few offhand comments and minor incidents in his past Jones has made Schwarzenegger into a monstrous android in the service of the New World Order, plotting a Hitlerian future for us all.

Important facts that don’t fit Jones’ assumptions are cast aside as he focuses on the selected minutiae that can be molded to fit his thesis. Never mind that Schwarzenegger is a political moderate with a pretty harmless set of policies in California, or that he’s been remarkably successful with very little support and even open opposition from the Republican establishment. For Jones there are no gray areas, so Schwarzenegger becomes the pinacle of a grand pyramid of conspiracy.

I by no means endorse Jones’ lunacy, though I do love the picture I borrowed for the head of this posting. However, so long as you take it as a fascinating voyage into the world of fiction, there’s some entertainment to be gained from checking out his theories on Arnold and the New World Order. His original article isHERE and some more recent conspiracy spinning can be found HERE - spurred by talk about changing the Constitution so Arnold can run for president.

As for the constitutional issue, I’m generally against changing the constitution unless it involves repealing the 16th Amendment. It really shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. This particular provision in article 2 was originally put in there with questionable intent, specifically targeting Alexander Hamilton and born out of the same kind of conspiracy paranoia that Alex Jones has inherited. Its impact has never been a serious issue before, though there was some talk at one time of Henry Kissinger as a candidate who would have faced the same problem as Schwarzenegger. At this point, with Hamilton long dead, it might be worth considering the change, but given the gravity of changing the Constitution we should move very slowly - but not because of anything Alex Jones is telling us.

Dave

Explaining the Federal Reserve

Many libertarians and others on the far right are concerned about the Federal Reserve and subscribe to the common conspiracy theory that it is a dangerous private monopoly operated by foreign bankers for their profit and to the detriment of the people of the United States. While I acknowledge that there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about Fed policy, the conspiratorial concerns are generally unfounded.

This issue is explored in an excellent article in Liberty Magazine by Bill Woolsey. He lays out in considerable detail exactly how the Federal Reserve works and provides as clear an explanation as I’ve seen of the nature of the institution and the illogic of theories about Fed conspiracies. He makes the very important point that even if there are foreign bankers involved in the operation of the Federal Reserve, the structure of the institution is such that final authority rests with government-appointed board members, not with the members who represent the banks investing in the Fed, so even if foreign banks and bankers are involved, they aren’t in control.

Dave

Hammering Some Truth

An excellent article over at Rant and Rave takes aim at three of the outstanding features of conspiracy mania: Birchers, Truthers and Chemies, and makes some excellent points about the way these irrational beliefs develop and the lifecycle they go through.

That’s just one of many interesting posts on the site. It’s well worth checking out.

Dave

Paper or Plastic?

Jeff Wagg notes: Naomi Baker is a chemical engineer and founder of the Houston Skeptics Society. She is currently in Mexico on her third Amaz!ng Adventure. Paper of Plastic? How do you answer?  If you give what you think is the 'correct' answer, you say ‘paper' or you've brought your own bags.  Let's examine that choice. The paper bags used in the grocery stores begin in the forest, with the clear-cutting of forests.  Even though trees are a renewable source, there is more to producing new paper than planting new trees.  The paper industry is one of the dirtiest industries we have.   The chemicals used in the paper pulp process include sulfur, bleaches, and acids.  The process uses huge quantities of water, which must be treated and cleaned, a process which also uses chemicals.  According to a representative of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, paper manufacturing also receives a larger number of complaints than refineries on ‘nuisance odors ‘ which is a term meaning that the facilities emit very strong, disagreeable odors, as unpleasant to live near as a feedlot.   Processing facilities must control odors to the same extent that they must control pollutant emissions.

Bad Medicine

Late last night my eldest daughter came downstairs complaining of a great deal of pain from an earache that just would not let her sleep. I could tell right away that this wasn’t a trivial complaint, plus she’d been congested for a week, so it was reasonable to assume that some of the congestion had moved into her ear and possibly become infected.

Concerned about what I could do to lessen her pain so that she could sleep and hopefully get up in the morning feeling better, I called our HMO’s health center to talk to a 24 hour nurse about the best way to treat the problem. Now, this is a nice service that the HMO offers. It’s a lot better to have a nurse to call than to get panicked and go to the emergency room or just tough it out until the next day and go in and see a doctor. A lot of problems can be solved with a little good advice over the phone and it keeps costs down for everyone. Basically a great feature for an HMO to have.

That is, of course, assuming the information the nurse gives you is useful, correct and medically valid. So I get hold of the nurse and run down my daughter’s symptoms and get some advice, including giving her decongestants (I already had) and ibubprofen (I already had) and a recommendation of a position for her to sleep in - different from the one I thought would be good, so definitely some help. Then out came the suggestion that gave us some hope for a modern, medical way to deal with the problem - over the counter anaesthetic eardrops. Yay! Something I could go to the store and pick up and give my daughter and say “here’s some medicine, you’ll feel better soon.”

As a parent I know perfectly well that there’s not an awful lot that can be done for an earache in a 12 year old. It’s going to hurt, then it’s going to get better and that’s the way of it. The doctor will want to throw antibiotics at it, but they won’t do anything for it until well after it clears up on its own, but something to lessen the pain until it clears up, now that’s appealing, especially because you don’t really want to tell the suffering kid to “suck it up” and live with the pain until it eventually goes away. So all excited, I hopped in the car for the 20 minute drive to the nearest 24 hour drugstore to get some Similsan.

I guess maybe the name should have tipped me off - ’simil’ implying similarity to medicine rather than actual medicine. And that’s what I discovered at the drug store. Similsan isn’t over the counter anaesthetic ear drops - something that does exist if you have a prescription - it’s homeopathic, meaning that it has virtually no actual medicine in it, it’s just water which someone basically waved some medicine at and the water is supposed to ‘remember’ the medicinal qualities. To make Similsan eardrops even more exciting, the ‘ingredients’ aren’t even anaesthetic or curative of anything even if they were present in measurable quantities. Chamomile and Sulfur have no known topical anaesthetic qualities. So it was another 20 minutes drive back home to tell my daughter that the ‘medicine’ the ‘nurse’ recommended was statistically no more effective than warm tap water for her affliction. In fact, I could make a better anaesthetic eardrop with things I have sitting around the house like aspirin or menthol or the bull nettles growing in the back yard, all which do actually have some topical efficacy.

Of course, by the time I got home the decongestant and pain killers had kicked in - actual medicine that works - so it wasn’t as pressing an issue as it had been. I’d just wasted about an hour of my day on the recommendation of some lady who claimed to be a nurse who I had thought would be trustworthy because she worked for our doctor’s clinic. What actually bothers me here is that a medical professional should be recommending a homeopathic remedy and that a reputable nationwide pharmacy chain should be selling the useless garbage. I realize that there are a huge number of gullible people who believe that homeopathy works, but as a medical treatment it repeatedly fails the test of both scientific analysis and plain common sense.

There’s a great article on homeopathy in the Free NewMexican. The teacher in this article has a book out on the subject which is available from Amazon. John Stossel did an outstanding expose about it on 20/20 in 2002. I’d give the link, but you have to pay a ridiculous amount for a transcript. There’s also a really good, comprehensive history and explanation of homeopathy on the Skeptic’s Dictionary website. Extensive studies have been done on all sorts of homeopathic remedies, and the results invariably show that their effectiveness is within a statistical margin of variation of placebos. Homeopathy is a classic example of magical thinking, where a scientifically valid idea - the basic concept of vaccines - has been extended beyond the point where it actually works. It sounds good to the gullible, but doesn’t stand up to any scientific or logical test. I’d just as soon put my faith in a gris gris, a magical amulet or a prayer wheel, and they’d be just as effective.

The scary thing is that homeopathy is a $200 million business and an awful lot of gullible people believe in it. The pharmacy I went to actually wanted $9.95 for what was in effect 4 ounces of pure water. The good news is that since there’s not actually anything in the homeopathic medicines they at least aren’t dangerous, unlike many of the unregulated herbal remedies on the market. Nonetheless, I’d really rather not have supposedly trained representatives of our medical system encouraging the use of magically contaminated water when I go to them for help. It tends to degrade my confidence in healthcare professionals as a group and make me wonder what we’re paying all this insurance money for. I half expect my next visit to the doctor to include diagnostic chicken feet, phrenology and the extraction of elfshot.

Extremists Undermine State Sovereignty Movement

There was nothing else on the radio late last night so I found myself listening to George Noory on Coast to Coast AM while driving home in the fog. I was pleasantly surprised that he was discussing the state sovereignty movement and the efforts of states to assert their rights under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Much to my dismay he was discussing this serious topic with two clowns — Alex Jones and Jerome Corsi.

He also had on State Representative Charles Key who is the sponsor of the sovereignty resolution in Oklahoma. Key is presumably serious about this topic and he laid out the argument for asserting state sovereignty pretty effectively. But I have to wonder if he realized how all the good he did in promoting the idea was undermined by appearing on the show with Jones and Corsi. All the credibility Key built up for the movement went right out the window when Jones started ranting about FEMA Camps (they don’t exist) and the international eugenicist conspiracy (a couple of crazy professors with a website) and how the current economic crisis was planned as a power grab by the international banks (who cleverly arranged to be bankrupted by it, fooling us all in their clever Jewish way) and government sponsored terrorism (Corsi is a prominent Truther). Or maybe Key doesn’t care, because he has also appeared on Jones’ radio show, apparently willing to do anything for publicity.

Defending the Constitution and restoring the rights and liberties on which this country was founded is pretty damned important. It’s something worth fighting for. It’s not something which ought to be trivialized. When you put it in the same context and at the same level as the silly conspiracy theories which Jones and Corsi make a living promoting then you lower it to their level. You take a real problem and a real issue and by association you render it as irrelevant as bigfoot and the Bohemian Grove.

I’m willing to believe that Jones and Corsi are well meaning, but by jumping on the bandwagon they do more harm than good. Because they have squandered what credibility they may once have had by outrageous behavior and promoting implausible theories they are poison to anything they touch. Like the Stormfront Nazis and John Birchers who flocked to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, they become a distraction and a liability destroying the thing they want to promote. You can’t take them seriously and you can’t tell which of the things they say to take seriously either. They have no credibility and they lessen the credibility of anything they become associated with.

The state sovereignty movement has a chance to do some real good. It could help to reestablish the Constitutional balance between the states and the federal government. But it is always a mistake to promote a serious issue to the lunatic fringe, because while that may attract a small group of fanatical supporters, their presence will drive away the much larger body of concerned citizens who might support your cause. People are willing to fight for their constitutional rights, but they don’t want to be made to look like fools for doing it. It takes a lot of guts to stand up and defy the establishment even when you’ve got a strong argument and expect to be taken seriously. But it’s just self-defeating to take a stand when the guy standing up next to you is dressed in a bilkini and carrying a sign declaring that the Queen of England is the Antichrist.

You’re known by the company you keep, and if people like Jones and Corsi continue to be identified with state sovereignty it’s going to lose credibility and the broad support it needs to succeed. People will just write it off as another rant from the lunatic fringe and move on. They should go back to selling videos they produce in their basements to people who store survival rations in their beards and leave serious issues free of the taint of their clown squad.

The EU Officially Embraces Quackery

Our associate in Hungary, Gabor Hrasko, informs us of this alarming situation:

You might be unaware of the fact that EU [the European Union] is promoting homeopathy and other alternative medicine in its directives. It urges the member countries to provide a simplified registration process for homeopathic remedies where the efficacy and safety of these drugs does not have to be proven. Chapter 2/Article 13/Paragraph 2 states:

Member States shall establish a special simplified registration procedure for the homeopathic medicinal products.

Hungary did it immediately. In my opinion it is against the Competition Act, as it provides exceptions for homeopathic remedies. It uses pseudoscientific reasoning, like "it can not cause harm due to the high dilution" while it does not use the same reasoning to realize that it could not have a specific effect due to that same fact.

All-in-all, homeopathy remains an important issue for the European skeptics, not only because it is a clear example of pseudoscience (as it is handled by the US skeptics), but because IN SPITE OF THIS it is a widely used practice. In Hungary and in many other countries it is used by real doctors who spent six years in prestigious universities studying physics, chemistry and evidence-based medicine earlier.

I must ask: Just why are such exceptions - "special procedures" - granted to quack notions, just because they are popular delusions?  Do we have to wait for major losses of life to occur, with the inevitable monstrous lawsuits that would ensue, before anyone assigns any importance to stopping fraudulent systems before they get to that state? I once thought that the EU was a splendid idea, but then I addressed a meeting in Oslo before Norway joined up, and found that those before me had no notion of the true nature of this farcical concept called homeopathy. Did they react to my exposure? No, they opted to go along with the fraud, anyway...

A Good Overview of the JBS

I’ve been working on an overview article on the John Birch Society and their peculiar worldview and their role in undermining legitimate conservative activism. In the process I found a rather good and surprisngly balanced overview article on the left-wing site publiceye.org. The site is pretty skewed overall, but their article on the JBS is informative. I think the bulk of it may have originated somewhere else since parts of it seem familiar.

Here’s a telling quote:

“In a sense, the Birch society pioneered the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric White racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the White supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII. Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism.”

This article also made me aware - though not surprised - that Phyllis Schlafly of the reprehensible Eagle Forum was associated with the JBS. Which in turn makes me wonder how heavily mormon influenced the group may be.

Dave

�� Previous Entries