Category: Brian Browne

•An empire is its greatest enemy.

An empire’s demise comes in unscripted, nonlinear steps. Unforeseen events and competitor nations arise to challenge the imperial seat. When guided by figures touched with the spirit that gave it greatness, the empire casts aside adverse events and rivals with singular purpose. At the empire’s most fecund stages, a political consensus exist that all other interests are subservient to the imperatives of collective greatness. No deed, from the noblest to the tawdriest, is outside the ken of the empire’s architects so long as the deed serves the empire. Every empire is built on equal parts heroism and crime because no empire comes without the taking of another’s possessions or life. A saint cannot erect a worldly empire; for he will love his foes not crush them. Nor can the abject madman because his endless folly will turn to defeat any victories gained. Building an empire requires a statesman capable of being saint or sinner depending on the situation. By creating an empire, the leader bequeaths more than wealth and power to his successors. It is for them to launder history by bleaching pristine his scarlet deeds; he also gives them the comfort of power and wealth whereby they can afford to act more humanely in maintaining the rare thing they have inherited than he did in building it.

Paradoxically, things never work as planned. The dynamics of imperial institutions eventually places the empire in the hands of those incapable of maintaining it. Success turns the political culture into a lathe of arrogance. Greed and ambition become high morality. Virtue and honesty are banished from secular practice. Money comes to count for everything because it can buy anything, including the souls and minds of society’s great men. Nothing that can be done without money is worth doing. A few great men and women still exist but none participate in governance. Those who govern are neither great nor evil. They are not sufficiently profound or possessed of an unshakable vision to be either. They are more interested in position and title than in achievement. The deeds that interest them are the ones that gain entrance into valued realty not the ones that gain entrance into history’s ledger. They would rather cut a bad compromise than stand for right.

These leaders preside over the slow leveling of a great edifice. The reduction happens so gradually and in such minute increments that no one involved realizes the descent. They believe things shall be as they always were. They see no great problems, so they take no warnings. They are sober, unimaginative figures who do not rock the boat because they never realize they are at sea. Impervious to the debt they owe history, they believe they own history. As such, they study nothing and understand even less. Their wisdom consists of their prejudices and ignorant notions of other nations and peoples.

Success has giddied them. A fatal turn of perspective is had. No longer do the empire’s leaders satisfy their personal ambitions within the context of the empire’s progress. The mindset shifts to exploring how the empire can satisfy the leaders’ selfish aims. They confuse being powerful with being all powerful. Thus, the treasury is squandered on wars in distant places of little consequence. The state becomes highly militarized. The people become inured to war. It becomes a national pastime much like organized sports. The more militarized the state, the less real its democracy and more imbalanced its economy. Yet, no true threat really exists.

Living without a genuine mortal threat, internal unity weakens. Competing elites see each other as enemies. They spend more time bickering than in sanitizing the body politic of the rot that may ultimately lay them low. A glittery decay sets in. Termites busy themselves at the woodwork. The mirror becomes a sword. The vast empire ceases being an extraordinary singularity. It fissures into a multiplicity of haggling constituencies led by lackluster personages. Inertia sustains the empire for a time but grandeur eventually fades. Because the leaders are below par builders and visionaries, they can’t save the empire by reviving the spirit upon which it was built. Instead, they summon real and imagined enemies to fight; they seek to lead through fear instead of inspiration. The military is called the save the empire where no danger exists.

Those in charge see themselves as different and superior to other people. They can no longer listen or learn. They believe what they want has the force of right and of law. But all it has is the force of force. They have inserted themselves into an unwinnable paradox. A durable empire is based on a balancing of interests between the center and the periphery. Thus, an empire that despises the diverse people under its umbrella is an empire in search of its own undoing.

Against this backdrop, President Obama’s new foreign policy team must be weighed. While disavowing imperial proclivities, American politicians’ frequent references to America as the “lone superpower” and the “indispensable nation” has but one meaning. America expends more on its military than all other nations combined. America has a military installation in most nations. If this is not imperial, than nothing is.

Senator John Kerry is the nominee to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s popularity surpassed her effectiveness. She travelled much but accomplished little. The world is no better than when she took office. The thrust of foreign policy remains in the talons of the military and intelligence combine mainly populated by hawkish conservatives who would rather destroy than dialogue with an adversary. Clinton was just the application of a liberal face to Prussian foreign policy. She was a glorified public relations officer. The oft dour Kerry will make the same pitch but with significantly less charm. Above all, he is an establishment man who will not ask even small questions about big matters. He’d rather excite himself by asking big questions about small matters.

Former Senator Chuck Hagel is the Defense Secretary nominee. Like his predecessor, Hagel is a moderate Republican. He is more cautious on Iran and more willing to see defense budget cuts than any known Republican since Abraham Lincoln. This moderation will estrange him to the uniforms in the Pentagon. These bureaucratically canny generals will make Hagel an outcast in the very department he is to run. The generals and the immense martial infrastructure atop which they sit will have their way. Hagel will make a decision but the generals will bury it then do as they please. Hagel will be powerless to stop them. They will salute him yet detest him all the while.

These underwhelming appointments signify that policy toward Africa will remain at low ebb. During his first term, President Obama kept Africa at arm’s length. He treated it like the ambitious man does the bumptious country cousin who pops up unexpectedly at the boss’s cocktail party. Afraid of being criticized as a radical, Obama did everything he to run away from things black, short of jumping out of his skin. Most observers state President Bush was more engaged and humanitarian on Africa than Obama. For once, conventional wisdom is right. Since the tact proved successful there is no reason why Obama would shift.

The contours of Obama’s approach toward sub-Saharan Africa are seen even in the western hemisphere. Beyond the bland indifference toward Black America, just look at Haiti. That nation is an African microcosm that was cargoed to the Antilles. Although it sits at America’s doorstep, the welfare of its people is that of the Congo. Haiti’s leadership is a motley collection of factotums to American interests but that avails nothing. So long after the devastating earthquake, the displaced still live in the same conditions that existed the week after the tribulation. Although former President Clinton is the UN’s coordinator for Haitian relief, he attracts no criticism for this dismal condition. In truth, Clinton struts about more like the American pro-consul than like a humanitarian. He has registered more progress in turning north Haiti into a resort of the rich and an industrial camp where American textile companies can open factories exploiting desperate Haitians at indecent wages.

Haiti sits atop significant but dormant oil and gas reserves because the United States has determined exploration is not in condign for the time being. Haiti seems accursed. This is not so. It merely suffers the consequences of the sentence imposed on it for having the temerity to declare itself an independent black republic some two centuries ago. What Haiti now eats Africa will soon taste.

The cornerstone of America’s African policy is AFRICOM. While AFRICOM started under his predecessor, the Obama’s indifference to the black world has allowed the military to give AFRICOM greater push. AFRICOM attempts to establish a large, permanent American military presence on African soil. Its purported reason — to help Africa build democracy — is laughable. A tumescent military is an internal threat to American democracy. Under the war on terror, the military and intelligence communities pressured the civilian establishment into legislation giving both the military and intelligence agencies unprecedented power to surveil, detain and kill citizens without recourse to judicial protection. It makes little sense that these institutions threatening democracy at home would nourish it abroad.

America’s Africa policy has two cynical objectives. First, the flow of natural resources to western economies must be safeguarded. This has adverse ramifications. African industrialization conflicts with American interests and thus American will do what it can to discourage this approach to economic development.

Second, America wants to ensure that terrorists groups don’t attain the capacity to harm the American homeland. The objective is to contain terrorism not end it. The American people want terrorism ended but the vast, lucrative condominium of military power sees things differently. In perpetual war, there are perpetual profits. Victory ends the funding banquet. Victory over terrorism would bring two defeats. The first one would be that of the terrorists. The second would be that to the expansion of the military. Thus, the military wants the threat tamed but also alive to keep afraid the America’s civilian leadership. This way, military funding remains at high velocity; the military’s influence in government grows like weeds in the untended garden.

Consequently, American never resolves nor retreats from chronic troubled spots. Somalia is as it has been. Congo is as it has been. Sudan has been split in two and now both sides are ready to lunge at the other’s throat in a moment’s notice. The insecurity attendant to the partition has put the Chinese on their heels. America now encroaches where China thought it had economic suzerainty. Oil is discovered in Uganda. America increases military aid and deploys Special Forces to find Joseph Kony’s Lord Resistance Army. Yet, they can’t find the jungle prophet because they are not looking for him. They would rather he exist because he brightens the halo of danger. The true reason for this and similar missions are to keep danger at the right level so that rival mining interests are deterred and pro-American one feel secure enough to work.

The American military now rehashes in Africa its escapades in Latin America decades ago. That experiment ended badly. Latin American militaries grew too mean and overconfident because of their American benefactors. Democracy was either beaten or blackmailed in the process.

The permanent deployment of a superior foreign military on African soil means trouble and less independence. For the foreign military to benefit Africa, it would have to place Africa’s interests above those of its home nation. This is impossible, particularly given that the American military already exalts its special interests above those of the nation it is meant to serve. The more African governments rely on foreign militaries for their stability is the more they forfeit independence. A nation’s domestic and foreign policies becomes dictated from abroad. Leaders of such nations are in danger of becoming glorified stenographers copying what others have told them.

This is particularly true given the nature of the current American government and military. America is a strong but uneasy empire seeking to reassert itself with a strong hand. American democracy has ossified to the point where only moneyed elites influence matters. The two richest and most powerful elites are Money Power and the military complex. Both are highly conservative and both disdain for representative democracy. Money Power constitutes the government behind the government. The military complex constitutes the government within the government. Neither is government by the people. Both are governments that bypass the people.

Nominally, President Obama sits atop the perch. However, he did not rise to the top as the head of a reformist movement. He got there by making a pact with the status quo. Being perceived as pro-black would break the pact he signed. In the end, he is a constrained, moderate leader of an imperial power working toward preserving its interests which are basically to return to the power relationships with Africa that existed two-three decades ago. Thus, Africa should expect no great succor from him by way of policies that would promote equitable economic development. In turn, Africa should not let the imperialists exploit Obama’s heritage as a device to outmaneuver Africa on its own soil. Africa must stand and think for itself for it does not have a brother in the White House. It might not even have a reliable friend there. All you can be sure of is that the empire will continue to grind away to get what it wants until such time that the empire has ground itself to dust or some miracle takes place allowing America to recover its better through governance by its more democratic, statesmanlike elements. In the dangerous neighborhood, one should pray for a miracle but prayer should be made with one eye open and the door locked.

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•Like a wheel that has lost its roundness, such is the leader who lacks wisdom.

This piece returns to one of this column’s perennial victims: the American political economy. Two factors drive the frequent analyses of American events. First, America’s contretemps affect Africa given America’s perch atop the global political economy. Second, Africa generally is enamored by things American. The continent hungers for success and America is success’s paragon. Thus, too many people mindlessly believe that every American practice is the right way. They do so without evaluating if the thing they copy actually benefits America let alone if the benefit will transfer to this continent. To copy seems to be the first, middle and last commandment of those who would rather America do their thinking for them.

This would not be so tragic if the mimickers were better versed in American history. Then they would hopefully steal examples from an era when America was economically robust, moving toward congenial employment and income equality. Not knowing enough about America’s complex history, the mimickers summarily conclude America is as it has always been. After all, why would a nation deviate from a winning formula? Yet such destructive deviation this is the way of man and empires. An empire is founded by the sweat of the great but lost by the folly of those who think they are great. Past empires have collapsed into the dust because they suffered chronic streaks of undistinguished leadership. While poor leadership keeps many African nations down, a similar want of leadership slowly fractures the mighty nation to the west. This must be the worst group of leaders America has experienced in roughly 130 years when the nation suffered the economic quakes and injustice of the Gilded Age.

For such a motley group to govern a great nation is tragic. How such a petty, unenlightened ensemble came to govern the world’s strongest nation will be recorded as one of this era’s pivotal events. Instead of begetting humility and gratitude, inherited wealth and power seem to encourage a prickly arrogance that believes it knows everything worth knowing. As it is with heirs to a family estate, so it is with the leadership of powerful states. Everything hard won can be easily squandered. Sadly, wisdom is a respecter of seisin. Wisdom is always too wise to encroach into space upon which arrogance has staked its claim. Thus, the American bald eagle slowly becomes a blind one and a blind eagle is a dangerous instrumentality unto itself and all things within its range of flight.

Even more tragic is the addict’s yearning of African leaders to copy America’s current mediocrity in hopes of repeating successes a bygone American era. It is like entering a dark room holding the candle at your back. Not only does this render the candle useless to your vision, getting singed will be the likely result of this irresolute meandering.

Yet, we continue to mimic with a steadfastness that would be laudable if directed at copying something other than America’s benighted present. Much like vapid fads in American popular culture, the imbalanced, hyper-capitalist policies of the American government are bound to come to a country near you in the not-too-distant future. Consequently, I analyze American events to explain what is happening as well as to warn of what is likely to come. Now to the main event.

During the waning days of last year, the international media was replete with reportage about the impending fiscal cliff toward which the United States was stumbling. The cliff was a combination of tax hikes and budget cuts estimated to reduce the U.S. government’s deficit by roughly 560 billion dollars this year. The sum is significant given that federal government spending is a few notches below 4 trillion dollars and total American GDP is roughly 16 trillion dollars. These projected reductions flowed from a 2011 bipartisan deal whereby Democrats and Republicans agreed to deep cuts to serve as a Damoclean sword hovering overhead, spurring them to make less drastic cuts prior to the January 1 deadline for the sword to fall. The obtuse logic behind this agreement reveals the bankruptcy of America’s leadership. They must be a deranged lot to first pass legislation imposing budgetary limitations no one wanted yet collectively being incapable of fashioning a legislative compromise around cuts most of them could tolerate. In others words, they found it easier to agree to an obviously harmful measure rather than pass a more agreeable law. In the hands of these illogical operatives, rests the fate of a major nation and the global economy. This should trouble your sleep and the dreams that sleep brings.

The strident fear was the fiscal cliff measures would return American to recession, dragging along the global economy in the process. To avert this self-imposed calamity, both Democrats and Republicans espoused cures as minatory as the cliff itself. Watching these political hacks was reminiscent of the duck-headed doctor’s solution to stopping a crazed patient from severing his left arm. The doctor was amazed by the intelligence of his solution to prevent the man from cutting off his sinistral limb: he simply would amputate the man’s right hand. The doctor was the only soul amazed by his acuity. All others were mortified by the implicit evil and glaring incompetence of his resolution.

Likewise, President Obama called for a “Grand Bargain,” a ten-year plan slicing 400 billion dollars from the deficit annually. This may have been grand in scope; it was the opposite of a bargain for the average person. If enacted, this would have cost the common man in the long-run. President Obama tried to honey-coat the arsenic by pledging continued tax breaks for the poor and middle class while advocating a mild tax increase on the wealthy. This was subterfuge to portray him as the champion of the man on the street. Yet, his tax breaks paled in comparison to the per capita reductions in social services and programs the deal promoted. What he offered the people on the front end, he would require in double payment on the back.

As bad as President Obama’s solution was, Republicans were much better at being worse. The budget cuts they wanted were more severe. Unlike Obama, Republicans bucked against tax increases for the wealthy. They were so arrogant that they refused to even bother with a gesture to the public. They unabashedly swam in the palms of the wealthy. Apparently, their answer to poverty is to let the poor waste away until there are no poor left.

In the end, the fiscal cliff was averted by a stop-gap “small deal” whereby tax hikes were avoided and decisions on budget cuts delayed for months. Sadly, this deal will prove injurious to the economy. The fiscal cliff generated false drama where none actually existed. With the false drama gone, media attention will divert elsewhere. The attention will divert when the more critical decisions on budget reduction are taken. The tax issues received great scrutiny but were always of secondary importance. Important budget cuts will be done in the legislative shadows. Anything done in the shadows will be an inferior product weighed toward those moneyed interests who created the shadows in the first place.

More importantly, the elite’s orchestration of the discussion of the fiscal cliff obscured a fundamental point. Both Democrats and Republicans espoused measures steeped in archaic economics. Watching the leaders of both parties spout their arcane explanations was like witnessing the commanders of medieval navies give detailed instructions to captains and midshipmen alike on how to avoid falling off the end of the earth. No matter how intricately presented, their ideas were flummery.

At no time during the discussion of the fiscal cliff did anyone question why a government with authority to print money must borrow its own currency. In the past decade, there was one congressman courageous enough to raise this question. The powerful conspired to segment and reconfigure his district so that he could not even regain his party nomination in 2010. Since then, the topic has been taboo.

Yet, this matter has deep significance if America is to regain its economic vitality. For those emerging nations copying the Anglo-American financial system, understanding this may well determine if they truly develops or whether their systems forever ossify into plutocracies. Contrary to the general public’s understanding, the American government prints relatively little money. By act of Congress, the government long ago transferred the authority to print currency to the private banking system. The vast majority of money in America is “printed” by private banks. However, private banks can only print new money based on making new loans. When a bank finds creditworthy loan applicant, the bank simply creates money to lend the person. The person gets money but at the cost of having to repay it with future interest. When government revenues are insufficient to meet expenses, government borrows money as well.

In this system, money creation also creates new debt. This is a banker’s paradise. Private banks create money out of thin air then derive interest on the money invented. This benefit should be enough. However, big banks are further secured by government borrowing. Government can never go insolvent. By law and due to their own self interests, certain large banks must fund government bond sales. Because of this, government can never run out of money. In an emergency, as during the recent banking crisis, government can resort to printing its money on its own. Thus, government always pays its debts. Government borrowing constitutes a vast welfare payment to the banking industry. The largest welfare payment in the history of mankind is being paid to the richest people in the history of mankind. This venal symmetry is being paid for by the poor and humble who don’t even realize the game being played. This system ensures that banks prosper and grow. By cosseting the banks, the system places the rest of the economy in debt peonage.

What this means is that anonymous bank loan committees, in aggregate, control the trajectory of the economy more than government fiscal or monetary policy. This is not the ideal way to develop an economy. The objectives of these loan officers and committees are selfish and narrow. They care only for their institutions and personal salaries. It is a fallacy of classical economics that a nation’s political economy is optimized by this mad dash of oft colliding selfish interests. What may profit an individual bank will just as likely injure the overall economy as help it. This is true because, to an extent orthodox economics seek to obscure, one man’s profit is another man’s loss. To keep the economic game from becoming too skewed to the detriment of most people, a regulator is needed. That regulator should be government. The American government has abdicated the role of a neutral arbiter, justly allocating economic profits and burdens across the various sectors of the economy. Instead, government is the servitor of financialist Money Power. For this reason, wages have stagnated, poverty increased and overall consumer debt mushroomed during the past thirty years, beginning with the Reagan era.

Taking a longer historic perspective, a tragedy of the Industrial Revolution was that it coincided with the evolution of this system of privately created debt money. Most economists assert this private money system positively contributed to the global prosperity associated with the Industrial Revolution. The correlation may not be as ironclad as mainstream economists think. That two events coincide does not denote a causal relationship. A small child always sees a newspaper on the front porch at sunrise. The child concludes the sun brought the newspaper. Only as he gets older and wiser does he realize how wrong he was.

The debt money system did not promote the Industrial Revolution. The sadder truth is the debt money system made the Revolution and capitalism in general more inhumane than they would have been. The debt money system took capitalism further down the Dickensian road of sweatshop labor and impoverishment of the working class. Had this system been supplanted by one where more money was actually debt free money created by government in direct payment for labor, services and good rendered, there would have been a more equitable allocation of money instead of the great hoarding done by the financialists.

The chronic economic stagnation the world now faces signals that centuries of this debt money system have run their course. There is too much private and governmental debt worldwide. The overall global economy buckles under the weight of this oppression. The debt money system is now a brake on future hope and prosperity. It is a parasite grown larger than its host.

We have a choice. Either this system is reformed or we are consigned to debt slavery. The average person and debt money system can no longer prosper at the same time. One has to give way so the other may get his way.

In the end, American and all nations that deploy this debt money system need to evaluate its continued use. The system’s custodians will cry that reform is impractical and that we must continue with things as they are because that is what responsible people do. The response is that this system has been too responsible for poverty, income inequality and the burgeoning strength of Money Power for it to be allowed to continue as is. They will fight back that the private sector is more efficient than government at all things economic and financial. The facts speak differently. More private sector ventures fail than succeed. This is the empirical truth and it hardly speaks of efficiency. When General Motors went underwater, government salvaged it, turning it into a profitable venture. When the banking system cannibalized itself into near extinction in 2009, government rescued it with trillions of dollars of aid. The private sector operates differently than the public sector but in reality is it no more efficient. Government is imperfect and flawed. But it remains a better regulator of the private sector, especially the financial industry, than the private sector can be for itself. After all, every financial crisis for over 100 years has been started by private sector folly not government mistake.

Those developed nations that want to revive their economies and not merely slink from crisis to crisis must recalibrate their financial systems to encourage greater creation of government (public) debt free money and the reduction in private bank debt money. For developing nations this rebalancing is even more imperative. To mimic what has contributed to the Western world’s financial stagnation is to immure developing nations in destitution. The nations of Africa need not worry so much about the sanctity of their borders or changing geographically. Yet they need to make new lands of themselves for the good of the people. The only way an old place can become a new land is through new ideas.

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