The Grandest Conspiracy of All ~Meet The Real Terrorists~

[seemslikeadream]

THEY HAVE DONE MORE DAMAGE TO THIS COUNTRY THAN AL QUIDA COULD HAVE EVER ACCOMPLISHED


No Conspiracies? I say bullshit, this was the granddaddy of all conspiracies

CEOs: (From left) Robert Willumstad (July 2008-September 2008), Martin Sullivan (2005-2008), Maurice (Hank) Greenberg (1968-2005)

Company: American International Group (AIG). world's largest insurance firm

On their watch: In Willumstad's brief tenure, AIG stock plunged from around $27 a share
to $2 a share, and the ailing firm agreed to an $85 billion government bailout. Sullivan left
after two quarters of record losses and $20 billion in sub prime-mortgage-related losses.
Greenberg was credited with shaping AIG into the world's largest insurer but was forced
out in 2005 due to a fraud investigation. No charges were filed against him.

Payout: $7 million for Willumstad's three months of work, $47 million for Sullivan and for Greenberg, despite the investigation, a 12 percent stake in AIG. That stake, however, isn't worth what it was once was. After the government bailout, Greenberg's $3billion interest nearly disappeared, and he dropped off the Forbes list of the richest people in the world

CEO: Ken Thompson

Company: Wachovia

On his watch: Shareholders called for his ouster at their annual meeting in April 2008 following a first-quarter loss and a dividend cut of 41 percent. Thompson had earlier promised the dividend would not be cut. He also came under fire for his $25 billion purchase of home lender Golden West, a deal he made at the height of the housing boom. He is shown here (at left) arriving at the April meeting. He resigned the next month.

Payout: $8.7 million

CEO: Michael Perry

Company: IndyMac Bank

On his watch: The bank collapsed in July 2008, in what regulators called the second largest bank failure in U.S. history. Despite mouting losses from delinquent loans in 2007, Perry insisted in December that the bank would be profitable by the second half of 2008. A protege of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, Perry was 45 when he was removed from his 15-year tenure as CEO during the FDIC's takeover.

Payout: Unknown. Forbes, however, listed Perry's five-year compensation total from IndyMac as $37.49 million.

CEOS Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron

Company: Fannie Mae (Mudd) and Freddie Mac (Syron)

On there watch: Earlier this year, Mudd predicted Fannie would "feast" on the reduced competition in the mortgage insurer suffered four consecutive quarters in the red amid the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression. Likewise, Syron reportedly rejected internal warnings that could have protected Freddie from the crises that ultimately brought it down. Fannie shareholders lost $52 billion as the stock plummeted 83 percent,while Freddie shareholders watched $36 billion go down the drain as its share price slumped 85 percent and its value sank to negative $5.6 billion. By the time the U.S. government extended a $2.25 billion credit line to each in July, Fannie's debts had reached $800 billion and Freddie's had reached $740 billion.

Payout: Zero. Regulators axed contract provisions that would have awarded both men hefty exit packages. Mudd was set to receive $9.3 million in exit pay, on top of his $12.4 million in salary, bonuses and stock profits. Syron's exit package could have amounted to at least $14.1 million. He has made $17.1 million in salary, bonuses and stock profits since becoming CEO in 2003.

CEO: Richard Fuld

Company: Lehman Brothers

On his watch: The firm declared bankruptcy on Sept. 15. In April he proclaimed to shareholders that "the worst is behind us," but for months he had dodged queries about the firm's exposure to toxic subprime debt.

Payout $22 million

CEO: Angelo Mozilo

Company: Country Financial

On his watch: The founder of the ill-fated mortgage giant, Angelo Mozilo, 69, was at the helm during the subprime fiasco that led to the broader credit crisis, Mozilo swore Countrywide would ride out the turmoil and emerge bigger than ever. Instead, he cashed out his stock options as Countrywide headed into a nosedive this year. To date, the company's worth has shrunk from about $25 billion to $2.5 billion.

Payout: $121.5 million. Mozilo gave up $36.4 million in severance pay, but is under SEC investigation for his $121.5 million stock gains.

CEO: Stanley O'Neal

Company: Merrill Lynch

On his watch: Shortly before his ouster last October, Merrill reported $7.9 billion in write-downs related to O'Neal's blundering forays into risky subprime-mortgage territory. O'Neal had snatched up subprime lender First Financial in late 2006, a move Portfolio magazine had likened to having "all the strategic wisdom of a foray into Havana real estate in 1959." Merrill's write-downs have since climbed to $45 billion.

Payout: $161.5 million

CEO: Charles Prince

Company: Citigroup

On his watch: Before he stepped down in November 2007, Citigroup, the world's largest bank, reported a 57 percent drop in quarterly earnings and lost nearly a quarter of its market value. "It is my judgment that -given the size of the recent losses in our mortgage-backed securities business, the only honorable course for me to take as chief executive officer is to step down, "he said.

Payout: $68 million

CEO: Jimmy Cayne

Company: Bear Stearns

On his watch: After serving as CEO for 15 years, Jimmy Cayne was conspicuously absent in the firm's final months. When Bear first disclosed mortgage losses last year, Cayne was at a Nashville bridge tournament. Eight months later, as Bear's non-executive chairman and as the company began its final descent, Cayne was at the North American Bridge Championships, where he could not be reached. Bear was sold days later to JPMorgan Chase at the bargain-basement price of about $10 a share, down from about $170 a share in 2007. Cayne had been worth about $1 billion in 2007, before Bear's demise shaved his savings down to about $600 million.

Payout: $61.3 million. Cayne and his wife dumped their Bear stock during the JPMorgan takeover. He will also receive another $4.6 million in JPMorgan stock.

[seemslikeadream]

1. Edit to add Disclaimer

It may seems kinda long but it is not really, there are lots of pretty pictures in between the words, courtesy Newsweek




And a little proof

FINANCIAL CRIME OF THE CENTURY


by Stephen Lendman

The crime of the century. The greatest one ever. Author Danny Schechter calls it “Plunder.” The title of his important new book on the subprime and overall financial crisis. Economist Michael Hudson and others refer to a kleptocracy. A Ponzi scheme writ large. Maybe an out-of-control Andromeda Strain. An economic one. Deadly. Unrecallable. Science fiction now real life. Potentially catastrophic. World governments trying to contain it. Trying everything but not sure what can work. Maybe only able to paper it over for short-term relief. Buy time but in the end vindicate the maxim that things that can’t go on forever, won’t.

The world as we know it is changing. Industrial capitalism. The entire global economic system. Interconnected. What affects one nation touches others. If the troubled country is America it reaches everywhere, and if the crisis is great enough, the disease may be fatal and human wreckage catastrophic. Precisely the current dilemma that world leaders and financial experts are scrambling to figure out. Desperate to contain, and not sure what, if anything, can work. How did this happen and why?

The result of unfettered capitalism’s fatal flaw - unbridled greed in a rigged system that rewards the few at the expense of most others. First an explanation of how it works. Free-wheeling, “free market” Chicago School fundamentalism the way economist Milton Friedman championed it in his 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom” and taught it to students for decades. He believed that government’s sole function is “to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies….and from our fellow-citizens.” Preserve law and order. Enforce private contracts. Protect private property and “foster competitive (unregulated) markets.” Everything else in public hands is “socialism….blasphemy.” Not to be tolerated.

He said “free markets” work best. Unfettered by rules, regulations, onerous taxes or any at all, trade barriers, entrenched interests, and human interference. That anything government does, business does better, so let it. That the best government is one that governs least. That public wealth should be in private hands. The accumulation of profits unrestrained. Corporate taxes abolished. Social services also, and that “economic freedom is an end to itself….and an indispensable means toward (achieving) political freedom.”

He called most all government interference a restriction of freedom. Opposed foreign aid. Subsidies. Import quotas and tariffs, and illicit drug laws for being a subsidy to organized crime, but he found no fault with major banks laundering their profits. He believed business should be unrestrained in maximizing them, even the illegal kind apparently.

He opposed the minimum wage and right of unions to bargain collectively on equal terms with management. He believed high wages and benefits harm everyone. They raise prices, and in the end, hurt workers as well as management. He called Social Security “The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on Earth,” even though it’s been the most effective poverty reduction program ever for millions of seniors who’d be desperate without it. Especially today given a deepening economic crisis. The nation’s social safety net disappearing, and heading everyone toward managing on his or her own. Dependent on their ingenuity, resources, and good fortune. Milton Friedman’s ideal world. For those who can’t make it, it’s their own fault. It’s everyone for him or herself in his judgment, and let the devil take the hindmost.

As for today’s largest ever unraveling Ponzi scheme, it’s just the workings of the “free market.” Creative destruction. “Freedom to choose.” The best of all possible worlds, and unfettered capitalism will figure out the right solutions. Provided government gets out of the way and gives it free reign. Free money also to wreck world economies and human lives even more than what’s already done.

The Chickens Are Home to Roost

Are they ever, and here’s what we’ve got. A global asset bubble. A predictable crisis allowed to build and mushroom. Begun after Chicago School economics took hold under Ronald Reagan. Continued under GHW Bush. Became religion under Bill Clinton, and ultimately fundamentalism under GW Bush.

The result - a “slow motion train wreck” gaining speed. Banks and other financial institutions failing globally. On September 25, the largest bank failure in US history with Washington Mutual’s collapse. Earlier it was giant insurer AIG. Before that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch a forced liquidation to Bank of America.


http://whitewraithe.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/grand-theft-america/



http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/29/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm?cnn=yes

Dow down 778, worst point drop ever, after the House rejects the $700 billion bank bailout plan.



The US Treasury's purchase of bad debt will benefit shareholders at the taxpayers' expense – and worse, won't work

Nouriel Roubini
guardian.co.uk, Monday September 29 2008 13:33 BST



Whenever there is a systemic banking crisis there is a need to recapitalise the banking/financial system to avoid a destructive credit contraction. But purchasing toxic/illiquid assets of the financial system is not the most effective and efficient way to do this.

Such government-led recapitalisation – via the use of public resources – can occur in a number of ways: by purchasing bad assets or loans; an injection of preferred shares; an injection of common shares; a purchase of subordinated debt; an issuance of bonds to be placed on the banks' balance sheet; an injection of cash; credit lines extended to the banks and government assumption of government liabilities.

A recent IMF study (pdf) of 42 systemic banking crises across the world shows how different crises were resolved.

In only 32 of the 42 cases was there any government financial intervention of any sort; in 10 cases systemic banking crises were resolved without any such action. Of the 32 cases where the government did recapitalise the banking system, only seven included a programme of purchase of bad assets/loans (like the one proposed by the US Treasury).

In 25 other cases there was no state purchase of such toxic assets. Even in cases where bad assets were purchased – as in Chile – dividends were suspended and all profits and recoveries had to be used to repurchase the bad assets. Of course, in most cases multiple forms of government recapitalisation of banks were used. ......(more)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/wallstreet.useconomy

[Hotler]

2. More good reading.

Well done. Thanks Dream.

[seemslikeadream]

3. Thank you Hotler, here's more ~Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/28/usforeignpolicy.useconomicgrowth


A shattering moment in America's fall from power

The global financial crisis will see the US falter in the same way the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. The era of American dominance is over


John Gray The Observer, Sunday September 28 2008 Article historyOur gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.

You can see it in the way America's dominion has slipped away in its own backyard, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez taunting and ridiculing the superpower with impunity. Yet the setback of America's standing at the global level is even more striking. With the nationalisation of crucial parts of the financial system, the American free-market creed has self-destructed while countries that retained overall control of markets have been vindicated. In a change as far-reaching in its implications as the fall of the Soviet Union, an entire model of government and the economy has collapsed.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

Despite incessantly urging other countries to adopt its way of doing business, America has always had one economic policy for itself and another for the rest of the world. Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.

Which version of the bail out of American financial institutions cobbled up by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is finally adopted is less important than what the bail out means for America's position in the world. The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.

In present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. The consequence, however, will be that America will be even more starkly dependent on the world's new rising powers. The federal government is racking up even larger borrowings, which its creditors may rightly fear will never be repaid. It may well be tempted to inflate these debts away in a surge of inflation that would leave foreign investors with hefty losses. In these circumstances, will the governments of countries that buy large quantities of American bonds, China, the Gulf States and Russia, for example, be ready to continue supporting the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency? Or will these countries see this as an opportunity to tilt the balance of economic power further in their favour? Either way, the control of events is no longer in American hands.

The fate of empires is very often sealed by the interaction of war and debt. That was true of the British Empire, whose finances deteriorated from the First World War onwards, and of the Soviet Union. Defeat in Afghanistan and the economic burden of trying to respond to Reagan's technically flawed but politically extremely effective Star Wars programme were vital factors in triggering the Soviet collapse. Despite its insistent exceptionalism, America is no different. The Iraq War and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy. The US will continue to be the world's largest economy for a while longer, but it will be the new rising powers that, once the crisis is over, buy up what remains intact in the wreckage of America's financial system.

There has been a good deal of talk in recent weeks about imminent economic armageddon. In fact, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism - the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in America over the last 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.While the impact of the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted American-style deregulation will best weather the storm. Britain, which has turned itself into a gigantic hedge fund, but of a kind that lacks the ability to profit from a downturn, is likely to be especially badly hit.

The irony of the post-Cold War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In American and Britain, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of American power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support America's over-extended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well planned.

Meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side-effects. Consider Iraq. The success of the surge, which has been achieved by bribing the Sunnis, while acquiescing in ongoing ethnic cleansing, has produced a condition of relative peace in parts of the country. How long will this last, given that America's current level of expenditure on the war can no longer be sustained?

An American retreat from Iraq will leave Iran the regional victor. How will Saudi Arabia respond? Will military action to forestall Iran acquiring nuclear weapons be less or more likely? China's rulers have so far been silent during the unfolding crisis. Will America's weakness embolden them to assert China's power or will China continue its cautious policy of 'peaceful rise'? At present, none of these questions can be answered with any confidence. What is evident is that power is leaking from the US at an accelerating rate. Georgia showed Russia redrawing the geopolitical map, with America an impotent spectator.

Outside the US, most people have long accepted that the development of new economies that goes with globalisation will undermine America's central position in the world. They imagined that this would be a change in America's comparative standing, taking place incrementally over several decades or generations. Today, that looks an increasingly unrealistic assumption.

Having created the conditions that produced history's biggest bubble, America's political leaders appear unable to grasp the magnitude of the dangers the country now faces. Mired in their rancorous culture wars and squabbling among themselves, they seem oblivious to the fact that American global leadership is fast ebbing away. A new world is coming into being almost unnoticed, where America is only one of several great powers, facing an uncertain future it can no longer shape.

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

August 25, 2007

Even before you open John Gray's book, its cover tells you to be afraid, to be very afraid.


Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Philosophers once aimed to teach us serenity. Buddha smiled as he contemplated the void and Socrates drank his dose of hemlock in the same spirit of wise acceptance. Philosophy today has a different agenda: its gift to us is a contagious fear, as it terrorises us into awareness of our world's dangerous fragility.

Even before you open John Gray's book, its cover tells you to be afraid, to be very afraid. The design couples a black mass with a bloodbath. Ants pullulate in the mire and gore: the lord of the flies has unleashed an infestation of pests. Is this the plague of insects that overran Maoist China when the peasants, browbeaten into the defence of the leader's agricultural regime, battered all the sparrows to death? Man, seeking to unseat God, imagines heaven is within his reach. Instead he creates hell on earth.

The September 11 atrocity licensed a succession of scare-mongering savants. Jean Baudrillard declared that the catastrophe was the West's moral suicide and announced, as the World Trade Centre crumbled, that God had declared war on himself. Slavoj Zizek, channelling the metaphysical terrorist Morpheus from The Matrix, welcomed us all to the desert of the real, where we eke out our remaining days as Nietzsche's "last men". John Gray has a cooler and more logical head than these prophetic obscurantists but his conclusions are no less unsettling.

History has not ended, as Francis Fukuyama fatuously predicted, in a utopia of contented globalised commerce. According to Gray, what lies ahead is a series of terminal convulsions. On an overheated earth, expiring humanity will squabble over diminished resources, goaded to frenzy by politicians who, like George W. Bush, take orders from a god created by their own demented delusions. Failed states will go on trafficking in nuclear or biological weapons and the person beside you on the London Underground might be one of Armageddon's special agents, an apocalyptic freelancer. We can expect the breakdown of civil society to begin at any moment.

My instinctive preference has always been to think of Bush and his lackey Blair as pious hypocrites rather than fanatics. Surely their wars are about the lust for oil, not the quest for righteousness? I find dishonesty and venality easier to deal with than a mad sincerity. Gray, however, almost persuades me that these men are crazed millenarians, whose policies - like the revolutionary terror of Robespierre or the institutionalised massacres of Stalin - rejoice in advancing the eschatological "End-Time". He quotes a frothing marine who led the assault on Fallujah: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. And we're going to destroy him." Bush's under-secretary of defence identified Iraq as "the principality of darkness", the homeland of "a guy called Satan", which of course incontrovertibly justified the invasion. We have heard more than enough about Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil"; Gray, examining a foreign policy based on demonology, underlines the asininity of goodness.


I'm less convinced by the way he annexes recent British political history to this doom-laden narrative. Margaret Thatcher may have believed the market economy was a divine imperative but I don't recall any "millennialist optimism" in her reforms. Nor do I altogether trust Gray when he argues that Blair's fibs were wish-fulfilment fantasies, "prophetic glimpses of the future course of history". Certainly Blair saw "the shaping of public opinion as government's overriding purpose", but for me this shows him to be a politician of the slick, elastic media age, not a messianic zealot.

All the same, Gray is right to scoff at the misplaced faith in progress propounded by Enlightenment philosophers (and co-opted by Robespierre, who thought of the guillotine as Occam's razor). Our knowledge may increase but that is no guarantee of moral improvement. We remain barbarians in business suits or in military uniforms. At the end of the book, dispensing with the fiction of secular hope, Gray reminds us about more ancient and truthful myths, which predicted our reckless pursuit of knowledge and power would lead to disaster: the fatal apple in Genesis, the fire stolen from Zeus's hearth by Prometheus.

As Gray hints by reverting to stories that scared early mankind into obedience, a peculiar and somewhat depressing conservatism underlies his radical critique. We are invited to be grateful for Her Britannic Majesty, our best protection against the rabid religion of Bush: Gray points out that "the few indisputably multinational democracies that are thriving at the start of the 21st century - such as Britain, Spain and Canada - are monarchies and relics of empire". He adds that it's absurd to believe that democracy, exported to the Middle East by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, can be self-legitimating, which is why most democracies, with the notable exception of the United States, rely on monarchs to stabilise them.

The notion of absurdity, of a world ludicrously abandoned to unreason, recurs often in Gray's book. He quotes Hobbes on "the privilege of Absurdity" as man's abiding lot and ends with Frank Kermode's declaration that "apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd". This explains what he means by castigating the Iraq adventure as "an intrinsically absurd project": a supposedly rational scheme that provoked carnage and chaos. The spectacle of this muddled brutality turns Gray from a philosopher into a satirist, violently amused by the self-defeating antics of the human race. He cites Gulliver's Travels as proof that we are unfit for residence in Utopia; it's not surprising that Will Self, another satirist eager for evidence that our species is doomed, has blurbed Gray as "the most important living philosopher".

In an attack on the evangelising atheism of Richard Dawkins, Gray sourly smiles at "the comedy of militant unbelief",that retains a Christian confidence in our uniqueness and our perfectibility. This is as much comfort as his book offers: as a respite from fear, why not try being amused? Philosophy has given up teaching us how to accept death. Instead it encourages us to enjoy universal extinction.

[seemslikeadream]

4. She's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her - to carry out her divine mission

Hijacking Catastrophe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SltOy_F6ZII&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YlcpXBFOXA&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZaWh0cJPQ&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8S_vOZqJbE&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GT7ti8LZ6A&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkOtqGNJ8qI&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C02QHS0D44&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YlcpXBFOXA&mode=related&search
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kBX00TR-aA&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghh00bn_DA&mode=related&search=


Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.


She's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her - to carry out her divine mission



http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/27/1454229

CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in human beings. You may recall she is the one that led Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to me that she's present in our country right now, just waiting to make her -- to carry out her divine mission.

By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just hype to sell books -- “The Last Days of the American Republic.” I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete problem in political analysis, namely that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is -- that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire -- that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship.

I’ve spent some time in the book talking about an alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the decision to give up its empire in order to keep its democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown, India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became, I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they, therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to give up their empire.

As I say, they didn't do it perfectly. There were tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo, French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the Kikuyu -- savage repression, really -- in Kenya; and then, of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all, Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something we should be discussing very hard in the United States.