In return you can have a McDonalds franchise

The following statements are all fact:

(1)The USA is by and large responsible for this Global Credit Crunch turmoil.

(2)They were also the first nation to kill millions of humans with the first atomic bomb.

(3)They are the biggest exporter of war, espionage, economic & military threat, and blackmailing of sovereign nations.

On his political blog, Real Clear Politics, Dennis Prager says,

“One of the most widely held beliefs in the contemporary world — so widely held it is not disputed — is that, with few exceptions, the world hates America. One of the Democrats’ major accusations against the Bush administration is that it has increased hatred of America to unprecedented levels. And in many polls, the United States is held to be among the greatest obstacles to world peace and harmony. “

Although the piece has a heavy right-wing bias, and goes on to say that its largely leftists that hate america and further that there is a lot about America that is also loved, especially by those on the Right, he does finish by asking:

“So what America does the American left love? That is for those on the left to answer. But given their beliefs that America was founded by racists and slaveholders, that it is an imperialist nation, that 35 million Americans go hungry, that it invades countries for corporate profits, and that it is largely racist and xenophobic, it is a fair question. “

BBC poll

It seems that many common Americans do not even realize that they have since long surpassed the UK and other colonial countries as the most hated nation in the world. So this article is about our American friends’ confusion over whether they are hated or not and why?

According to a new BBC poll it wasn’t just George W. Bush’s personality that made America so unpopular but there are underlying foreign-policy issues,” says Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll. “[Obama’s] election alone is not enough to turn the tide. People are still looking to see if there are significant changes in US policies.”

Ex President Bush said that these terrorists hate democracy & freedom and therefore attacked the USA. I beg to differ, those attacks were a result of anti-American hatred more than anti-Democratic sentiments. America, as a self-identified military big brother has been harassing much of the developing world for multiple decades.

“Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent.” The Guardian, Sep 13 2001.
The main reasons for the overwhelming cry is that the USA has bombed, suppressed Islamic Nations and restricted them financially, commercially and politically. This has snowballed since the demise of the perception of a communist threat. There is utter desperation that Washington is crusading against Islam and that recent events are only an excuse to continue a Christian oppression. Many Muslims believe that the American people have been deceived by their government. Others just want the endless poverty and strikes to stop. There is a strong feeling of repression and of being hated. A mood of resentment toward America and its behaviour around the world has become so commonplace in their countries that it is bound to breed hostility, hatred, and then renewed physical violence. The West calls it “terrorism”, they call it “retribution” against the American symbol of Western oppression. Another sore point is that the USA continues to protect, encourage and finance Israel’s 6 decades of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The USA thwarts every humane gesture by the United Nations. The USA encourages and financially supports the slaughter of several hundred innocent people in Palestine every year by the Israeli death squads.

Global leaders in consumption

To sustain their lifestyle US citizens consume about 10 to 20 times the resources per capita of the average of the rest of the world including Europe. Americans think they’re the most productive people on Earth. They are not. They don’t produce the most. They just consume the most. Just as one example, they burn about 25% of the fossil fuels which are consumed by all people on Earth, but US citizens are only about 4% of the population of the Earth. So that means that they consume about (25/4)/(75/96) = 8 times the average of all other nations. US citizens consume about twice the fuel of western Europeans for approximately the same standard of living. But when countries which supply critical materials to the USA threaten to deny supply, the USA is quick to go in with the military to ensure continuation. Americans think that their excessive consumption is an indication of their moral superiority, but in fact the opposite is true.

An eye for an eye makes the World blind

Of course, there is no possible moral justification for killing 3000 innocent civilians on 11th Sept 2001. The 9/11 terrorist attack was a deep blow for the USA and the West as a whole. However in the grand scheme, this loss of life was but a mere drop in the ocean compared to the suffering inflicted on the world by the USA. Perhaps I should mention that the murder rate by guns in the USA is about 110 per million per annum or about 30,000 deaths each year for the whole country. So the deaths on 11/09/2001 equalled a typical 5 weeks of murders in the USA. The USA has killed about 150,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq since 11/09/2001. That’s a 50-to-1 revenge ratio.

You can’t make someone love you by beating them with a stick. Americans should find ways of feeling good without killing people. Killing foreigners is not the only way to feel proud to be American.

Sometimes I wonder if the USA has been using a “Killing the chicken to frighten the monkey” strategy. In other words perhaps the US government does not care if they are killing the wrong people. Maybe they just kill tens of thousands of Muslims so that there will be general fear of the USA to make the world respect the USA. The “chicken-killing” strategy was used by Lenin in 1917/1918 when he ordered thousands of Russians to be killed at random to terrorise the population in general. One of his followers asked for trials so that the innocent could be spared. But Lenin said he could not allow innocent people to feel safe. He said that no one should be allowed to feel immune from the terror.

The USA in many ways is an excellent country. The real reason why the USA is rich and powerful is research. There is no country on Earth that invests so enthusiastically in real research as well as the USA. The problem is that this research is so often at cost to the rest of the world both in wealth and lives. Many of today’s achievements would not be possible without the help or aid of the USA. Many medical or technological advances and much human aid and third world relief comes from this rich nation [As an aside, I remain sceptical about the lunar landing - watching the hollywood film “Capricorn One” did not help the case either.]

Machiavellian mindset

any means (however unscrupulous) can be used by a ruler in order to create and maintain his autocratic government

The USA has only 4% of the world’s people. So having friends is really essential, but Americans won’t make friends as long as they think that other countries are populated only by barbarians and theme park attendants.

America is perceived to stand for its commitment to democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and free speech, which ironically are the very source of the disappointment. It is the country that has a “World Series” of baseball with teams from all over the “World of USA”!

Maybe investing some profits from the USA global positioning system [GPS] into teaching basic geography to the ordinary Americans would help them realise the presence of other poor souls sharing this “world” with them.

Welcome dearest readers to Ultranomics

This will be the first edition – hopefully the first of many – of your newest and shrewdest viewsletter covering the economic situation both here in the U.K. as well as back in the Homeland of Pakistan.

Why Pakistan of all the places in the world and what the heck does Ultranomics mean you might enquire?

The answer to the first question is that we, your two co-editors that is, happen to be Brit-Paks (or EuroPaks if you’re pro-European Union and into milk cartons) and thought that it was about time we stopped our idle armchair commentating and actually put our points of view out there.

As for the name Ultranomics – well we made it up, so it never existed before – a bit like this website. But you could say its a concatenation of ‘Ultra’ and ‘Economics’ and in that there may be something to ponder for minds that like to ponder on such things. We don’t mind admitting to being somewhat impressed by the renowned American economist Steven Levitt who wrote the ground-breaking book Freakonomics. Its possible that subconsciously we picked up some inspiration from his work (but we’re not admitting to it)!

So folks, we’re going to don our thinking caps, dust off our wrist-rests and pretend for a while to know how and why the world ticks for us as it does. At least we’ll do our best in any case……bearing in mind that we’re not so pompous as to believe that the true workings of the gears of humanity versus Mother Nature are fathomable. Heck even the bankers, the ’stewards’ of our wealth never saw Mother Nature coming! But you’d better believe that she can’t be scammed for too long a time. In the long term Nature, for example in the guise of the markets, rewards us not with what we think we need or desire, but ultimately with what we deserve. We can only get away with risky speculation for so long. In the end the chickens always come home to roost.

Take those central banker’s, i.e. the Alan Greenspans of the world, who must truly have believed that they could simply print as much paper money as they liked to keep their ‘borrow,borrow,borrow’ and ’spend,spend,spend’ economies (B.S.economies!) afloat.

But dear readers this was literally money made out of thin air, not backed by a country’s hard assets or economic output. It was easy money and, whenever you pump easy money into a monetary system in simple terms you tend to get inflationary bubbles, such as the dotcom bubble of 2000 and of course the house price bubble that just went pop in the western world this year (2008). When the bubbles go pop the assets lose their inflated values. In the case of US housing they’re talking about a loss of housing ‘wealth’ in the order of $6-8 trillion – or thereabouts, give a trillion or two (who’s really counting and what does a trillion actually look like anyway???). That could amount to an average of $120,000 per US householder. But of course what everyone’s losing never existed in the first place. Those phoney paper notes printed by the US Federal Reserve have gone back to where they came from, thin air!

Anyway, you get our gist don’t you? There’s a lot under the surface that we’d like to talk about and if you bear with us, we hope to tell it to you in an entertaining a way as possible. It might take a week or two to get into our groove, but check back often and see how we’re progressing. Better still, go ahead and subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up to our regular ultraletter email. We value privacy so it goes without saying that your email address will never get past our website and of course you can unsubscribe at any time. We thank you in advance for your time and brains and hope we can imprint some interesting ideas into them.

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Hey readers, your humble co-editor jq has some pet hates to rant about too….

Pakistan – Some Core Issues

9th November 2008, JQ (co-editor)

I had always promised myself to be the beacon of righteousness in the face of all of the worlds’ wrongs but “home economics” always got the upper hand and until today did not not let me sort the socio-political world of real economics as Adam Smith would like to define. Well the good news [or bad depending upon which side of the scale you are on] is that the genie is now finally let loose by the thought police to play havoc on all of you alternative readers who took time out to find us. I say alternative because like TK mentioned we are different and want to present unique out of the box and possibly witty debate about the ultra problems at hand. So welcome to the ultranomics way of thinking.

I would start with some moans and groans to set the temperament! Then in the coming days we will look at possible resolutions to the ongoing painful points of Asian Economics (particularly in Pakistan) through the “common sense” approach. They say that common sense is very uncommon and honestly speaking not many brain cells seem to have been used so far otherwise Pakistan would not be in the current mess and would not still be banded among the third world countries, even though it is an atomic power.

The basic needs of a human being in today’s world can be summarised under the headings of food, shelter, power, health, safety, communication and transportation. Now if you live in Pakistan please look around and honestly answer as to how many of the population has access to all of these let alone a single one! Pakistan was created “60” long years ago and so far we don’t even have a proper international airport for the capital Islamabad and still are using the old Pakistan Airforce site.

It is shameful that being an agricultural country we are struggling to feed our own people, who in some cases are now forced to sell their own children in order just to get by and pay the bills. What happened to the Muslim Caliphates’ philosophy of being responsible for feeding even the single stray dog? George Orwell wrote: “All men are equal, but some are more equal than others.” I guess this stands true for the people in the driving seats of our poor country Pakistan’s throne who travel in expensive, third-world -country-budget-busting, lush bullet proof cars and eat lavish meals in comparison to a common Pakistani man who is struggling to pay his bills and only striving for daily grub so tell me how can we send a mission to the moon like India did, can anyone answer? Anyone from Suparco!

The Planning Commission of Pakistan believes that around 35 per cent of the Pakistani population are falling below the poverty line while the Pakistan Finance Ministry estimates only 22.3 per cent in accordance with the latest official survey [really have you ever seen a surveyor outside your door?]. This controversy if not resolved immediately, could potentially block the World Bank loan worth $500 million for Pakistan [I thought we had broken the so called kashkol] under the Poverty Reduction Strategy Credit (PRSC), which is desperately required to improve the depleting foreign currency reserves of Pakistan. Under the World Bank conditions Pakistan will have to prepare the PRSP setting targets to reduce the prevalence of poverty and establishing social safety nets in order to obtain a credit line of $500 million from the PRSC. The Finance Ministry is preparing the PRSP document for presenting to a visiting mission of the World Bank but is clueless about which figure is the official line. This really is mind boggling because if we cannot even get our statistics right then how are we supposed to plan our future. What happened to the professional norms and attitudes of the civil servants?

Why do all of the Pakistani roads have to be rebuilt every year? [I have to say the Pakistan motorway is an exception - credit where credit's due]. This is fuelled only by the kickback culture. Call it potato, call it potaato – the word though is “bribe” and will lead to hell fire. We will never know the real reasons why the Karachi bypass fell within days of its opening killing dozens of innocent civilians, so who will pay for their blood and the misery of near and dear ones? Can you put a price tag on anyone’s life? Can you price your own life’s worth?

We were taught in school that the essence of democracy is that it is for the people, by the people and of the people, it is the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and the judiciary with all of them being independent of each other. In Pakistan no such arrangement exists so far. The Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhary is a case in point who has yet to get any justice, so does a common Pakistani stand any chance of fairness in his trials?

Though it is true that states such as Pakistan with a weak economy and weaker political structure cannot hope to safeguard their sovereignty from arrogant superpowers such as the US, most Pakistanis still expect their rulers and armies to make a real effort toward this end instead of making hollow claims and raising false hopes [once is enough in 1971 war]. With such low credibility the ruling elite cannot hoodwink the people who now, thanks to the communication revolution and open access to the world media, are much more informed and enlightened and should not be taken for granted because they are able to fully grasp any given situation and arrive at intelligent decisions. We really need to take heed from the strong reaction of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad’s government, which described the killing of eight Syrians in the attack as a “cold-blooded war crime”, demanded an apology and warned of consequences. With week knees if Pakistan cannot even stop its so called “allies” from attacking its borders then how are the Pakistanis going to get some favourable decision on the good old Kashmir issue?

Questions, questions and more questions! I will end this first journal perhaps for you to ponder and will touch all of the above and more Pakistan and Asian core issues, however my aim is to discuss a way forward and eventually suggest some solutions, yes solutions because we all know the problems by now and its time to get rid of them for good.

jq@ultranomics.com

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