U.S. Defense Secretary Gates: Pro-Democracy Protests are Iranian Conspiracies

Well I guess it's pretty obvious that the stabler U.S. allies wouldn't have burgeoning democracy movements, but dangerous Islamism - bankrolled, of course, by the regional Islamic state that just happens to have nationalized key western interests:

""We already have evidence that the Iranians are trying to exploit the situation in Bahrain and we also have evidence that they're talking about what they can do to create problems elsewhere," Gates said.

"Saudi Arabia led a joint Gulf force that deployed there last month, enabling Bahraini authorities to quell protests calling for democratic reforms.

"On Sunday, foreign ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which Saudi Arabia is a leading member, accused Iran of interference in the affairs of Bahrain and Kuwait in a campaign to destabilise the region."AJE: US and Saudi Arabia discuss Iran 'meddling

Oh yes, you read that right: the U.S. is with S. Arabia in claiming that Iran is fomenting pro-democracy conflicts in the region (which makes sense because the "green revolution" protesters in Iran certainly couldn't be emboldened by these demonstrations). The Saudi Arabians have a good point though: unspecified Iranian meddling is certainly more of a cause for alarm than the Saudi-backed violent repression of a marginalized ethnic majority. Yep: Bahrain has an ethnio-nationalist oligarchy imposing unpopular rule over the ethnic majority; an unpopular rule that is being bankrolled by USAID and enforced by the engorged Saudi military when Bahrainians can't keep their ethnic underclass under control.

But don't worry folks, the real threat are those Iranians who had the audacity to demand that a local regime control (some) of their capital. The same Iranians who bankroll the resistance to another ethno-nationalist regime aligned with the west. Is it just me, or is this story getting old?

Herbert Hoover Left False Evidence to Hide Influence of J.P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont

According to Thomas Ferguson, Hoover wrote diary entries which directly conflicted with his private account of events:

"The onset of the Great Depression opened a new phase in the decay of the now creaking system of '96. As the Depression grew worse, demands for government action proliferated. But Hoover, who gradually became so in thrall to the big banks that he concealed Morgan's crucial role in initiating his famous European debt moratorium of June 1931 by deliberately faking entries in a "diary" that he left historians (one of whom years later cited it as evidence for the independence of Hoover, and the American state from the bankers), opposed deficit-financed expenditures and easy monetary policies.⁷⁹ After the British abandoned the gold standard in September 1931 and moved to establish a preferential trading bloc, the intransigence of Hoover and the financiers put the international economy onto a collision course with American domestic politics. Increasingly squeezed industrialists and farmers began clamoring for government help in the form of tariffs even higher than those in the recently passed Smoot-Hawley bill; they also called for legalized cartels and, ever more loudly, a devaluation of the dollar through a large increase in the money supply." Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition Thomas Ferguson, pp. 145 (my emphasis)

Libyan Oil and Consumer Demand

Auerback makes a few critical points in his recent article,The Economic Policy Behind Intervention in Libya Chases Its Own Tail (HT: Naked Capitalism). Forgive the banal usage of "we" to associate oneself with the ruling clique, and we have a viable polemic against US fiscal and foreign policy:

"We seem to have developed a very basic rule of thumb when it comes to these wars of choice: if an insurgency threatens oil supplies directly or indirectly, we move. If it doesn’t, we don’t. Hence Syria can kill thousands of insurgents (as they did in the early 1980s) and we do nothing. Yemen doesn’t have oil facilities; so we do nothing. In Bahrain we have a huge base and unrest has repercussions for the Shiite part of Saudi Arabia where the oil is. We move via the Saudis. In Libya there is oil. Again, we moved.