Mammon or Messiah research

2011-07-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

Parsons/Makwana: The Silent Humanitarian Crises Beyond East Africa

2011-07-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

The international response to the East African crisis is far short of urgent needs, yet the extreme deprivation being reported is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Silent Humanitarian Crises Beyond East Africa

by Adam Parsons and Rajesh Makwana article link article link article link

July 22, 2011 | CommonDreams | Dissident Voice | Share The World's Resource (STWR)

The unfolding crisis in the Horn of Africa is yet another tragedy that reflects the dysfunction and injustice inherent in the structures of the world economy. Although the factors that are currently causing widespread hunger and deprivation across a large part of the region include the worst drought for 60 years, escalating food prices and continued regional conflict, the problem is largely man-made and entirely preventable if sufficient resources are redistributed to all people in need.

Around 10.7 million people already need urgent humanitarian assistance, while many thousands are fleeing a devastated Somalia each day to take refuge in makeshift camps across Ethiopia and Kenya. The United Nations has now officially declared two regions of southern Somalia to be in famine - a situation in which at least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food and other basic necessities, and starvation, death and destitution are evident. As the Famine Early Warning Systems Network makes clear (pdf), the currently inadequate levels of humanitarian response are likely to see famine spread across all eight regions of southern Somalia within two months and could lead to "total livelihood/social collapse".

With food insecurity in the East African region remaining an ongoing concern for decades, many humanitarian agencies have been trying to draw attention to a potential famine in these countries for some time. The UN made an appeal for $500m in 2010 to assist with food security, but managed to secure only half from donors. Consequently, hunger levels have rocketed over recent months, and in some areas the number of young children suffering malnutrition is now three times the normal emergency level. At least half a million children risk death if immediate help does not reach them, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).

The humanitarian coordinator for Somalia has also described the lack of resources as alarming, with insufficient donations of food, clean water, shelter and health services to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Somalis in desperate need. The underlying problem is repeated by various aid organisations: that the international response is not commensurate with the urgent requirements of those affected by the humanitarian catastrophe, and there is a lack of international support to address the deep-seated causes of the crisis or to mitigate future crises.

Yet the extreme deprivation being widely reported across East African is just the tip of the iceberg. Needless impoverishment and death is an ongoing catastrophe that unfolds daily, largely without any attention from the world's media or the public. At least 41,000 people in the developing world continue to die each day from easily preventable diseases that barely occur in high-income countries, such as diarrhoea, malaria or nutritional deficiencies. Despite the scale of these preventable deaths - amounting to 15 million lives lost each year, half of which affect young children before their fifth birthday - there is no official recognition that such extreme deprivation should also be considered a humanitarian catastrophe and treated accordingly.

These shameful mortality rates occur as a result of the ongoing silent disaster of world poverty, which receives a similarly inadequate international response to the periodic famines or food crises in countries like Somalia. For over a decade, international efforts to reduce poverty have centred around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of globally agreed targets that are set to expire in 2015. Although the MDGs have done much to focus attention on global poverty, they are widely considered an insufficient and superficial approach to economic development and saving lives.

A deadly lack of ambition

The politically sensitive principles of equity and distributive justice that featured in the original Millennium Declaration have gradually faded from the official development discourse, accompanied by a deadly lack of ambition. Even if the MDG goal on halving rates of poverty is met, a staggering 882 million people will still be living in absolute poverty in 2015. In effect, the MDG's focus on merely reducing over time the number of people living below the threshold of human survival tacitly accepts the continuance of poverty-related deaths each day. Similarly, goals four and five commit to reduce maternal mortality by only three quarters by 2015, and under-five child mortality by two-thirds, which accepts not only a high number of preventable maternal and child deaths remaining at the end of the MDG period, but also many millions of such needless deaths in the interim.

In an interdependent and globalised world, there can be no meaningful process of development whilst so many people living in poverty die prematurely and unnecessarily. The impact on families, communities and economies are devastating, and preventing these deaths is an urgent moral necessity. Even in the crudest economic calculations, putting an end to avoidable deaths would amount to a significant investment in human capital, as healthy individuals whose basic needs are secured are far more likely to contribute to the growth of communities and nations. It is objectionable from any social, moral or economic viewpoint that sufficient resources are not immediately made available to address the crises of extreme deprivation, especially in its most acute manifestation well before the situation degenerates into a full-blown famine.

International efforts to address the life-threatening poverty of millions of people in the poorest countries must aim far higher and provide much more than the current insufficient, voluntary and often conditional donations of overseas aid and disaster assistance. A massively upscaled redistribution of resources from North to South is essential to avert humanitarian disasters and prevent extreme deprivation and poverty-related deaths. Given the scale of these related crises, an international program of emergency relief must become the highest priority of world governments, followed by assistance for developing countries to secure ongoing state-provided welfare and essential services for all their citizens. Efforts to improve the redistribution of wealth nationally through the development of local industries, better taxation and the provision of comprehensive social protection for all people should become the new focus of international development policy.

Central to this transformation of development is the principle of sharing, which embodies universally accepted ethical values that reflect our common humanity. Aligning the international policy discourse more closely to our shared moral obligations can help redeem decades of unjust economic and social policy, prevent future famines and help manifest an inclusive vision of progress and development. In the simplest economic terms, sharing points to the need for a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, and a shift in power relations from financial and commercial interests to the world's majority population. The East African crisis presents another opportunity for civil society to demand that wealth and resources are shared more equitably across the world, and that policy-makers prioritise the complete eradication of poverty above all other concerns.

Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World's Resources, (STWR) a London-based NGO campaigning for essential resources - such as land, energy, water and the atmosphere - to be shared internationally and sustainably in order to secure basic human needs. He can be contacted at adam(at)stwr.org.

Rajesh Makwana is the executive director of Share The World's Resources, (STWR), a London-based NGO campaigning for essential resources - such as land, energy, water and the atmosphere - to be shared internationally and sustainably in order to secure basic human needs. He can be contacted at rajesh@stwr.org

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Somalia: the Real Causes of Famine

by Michel Chossudovsky article link

July 21, 2011 | Global Research

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The Famine in Somalia: The Use of Food as an Instrument of Warfare

U.S. and Ethiopia Kill Somalis With Food Weapon

by Glen Ford article link article link

July 21, 2011 | Global Research | Black Agenda Report

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Republican Lawmakers Tell the World Where to Go

by Jim Lobe article link

July 22, 2011 | CommonDreams | Inter Press Service

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Ensuring Fair Shares in a World of Limits

As worldwide demand increases for natural resources that are already in short supply, how should aid donors and campaigners respond?

by Alex Evans article link article link

July 22, 2011 | CommonDreams | The Guardian/UK

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Ralph Nader: Why Not Corporate Patriotism for a Change?

2011-07-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

If companies are given American rights, they should have loyalty to this country too.

Why Not Corporate Patriotism for a Change?

by Ralph Nader article link article link

July 21, 2011 | CommonDreams | The Chicago Tribune

The fireworks and celebrations that mark Independence Day are over. But the need for a national conversation on corporate patriotism has never been more timely.

For more than 125 years the courts have been awarding corporations most of the constitutional rights possessed by human beings. Corporations — as artificial entities — now almost have rights equal to "We the people," even though the words "corporation" and "company" are not mentioned in the Constitution.

Under the current 5-4 conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, "corporate personhood" is spreading. The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case allows unlimited independent corporate expenditures for or against any political candidates.

Since large corporations keep unleashing their corporate attorneys to push the domain of corporations as "persons," it is way overdue to judge them by the same yardsticks as we judge real persons.

U.S. corporations, chartered (born) in the U.S., rising to great size and profits because of American workers, saved or succored repeatedly by taxpayer subsidies and bailouts in Washington and state capitals, and sometimes rescued by U.S. Marines or protected by the U.S. fleets when they are in trouble abroad, owe the American people and our country some measure of loyalty and duty.

Instead of extending patriotic gratitude, large U.S. corporations increasingly are sending the opposite message. "We're outta here, with your jobs," their behavior says. Unfortunately, some CEOs appear to have no problem with dictatorial communist regimes like China or oligarchies like Mexico that know how to oppress impoverished workers. Workers in China cannot start independent unions or uniformly use independent courts to recognize their health, safety and economic rights.

Products from foreign sweatshops are exported back to the U.S. where abandoned factories and communities proliferate.

Corporations say they love their country, especially when it comes to manufacturing modern weapons systems for the Pentagon. So let's extend this love and see how they measure up patriotically.

Is it patriotic for drug companies to leave our country without any production facilities for ingredients used in penicillin and other key drugs because they have shipped production rapidly in the past decade to China and India which lack the inspection standards we have here? Leaving America defenseless and so dependent in this critical area is especially galling. Remember Big Pharma accepts billions in tax credits and valuable free research, development and clinical testing by the National Institutes of Health for many important pharmaceuticals.

Is it patriotic for CEOs to continue using public services and gobs of corporate welfare while they move their corporate headquarters to a small office in the Bahamas or other tax havens to escape paying their fair share to the Treasury? Such tax escapees burden ordinary taxpayers further.

Is it patriotic for CEOs to demand and use taxpayer dollars to facilitate moving abroad with their industries? The latest version of this lack of fealty is taking large federal subsidies for solar energy research and development and then moving the production facilities to China. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, has written critically of this ominous, job-draining trend.

Is it patriotic for General Motors to be saved from bankruptcy by taxpayers and still keep billions in taxpayer-paid reserves and credits, yet lobby against the Obama administration's proposed overdue safety and fuel economy standards?

In 1996, I sent letters to the CEOs of the largest hundred U.S. chartered corporations, urging them at their annual shareholders meeting, in the name of their corporation (not their boards of directors or officers) to pledge allegiance to the flag.

For example, the CEOs would stand up, and on behalf of General Motors, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, Pfizer or Bank of America, "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The many responses were instructive. Only Federated Department Stores thought it was a good idea. The other companies either said that they would take the suggestion under advisement or they misinterpreted my letter as asking for pledges by corporate officials and shareholders, no matter what their nationality. Ford Motor Co. flatly declared "the concept of corporate allegiance is not workable." In high dudgeon, O. George Everbach wrote back declaring "Kimberly-Clark believes that it has an inalienable right to choose when, where and how it wishes to display its patriotism."

Well at least Kimberly-Clark recognized the concept. Now it is time for American workers and taxpayers to say to corporate America that companies can't always have it both ways — to receive all the benefits of American corporate personhood and avoid all the expectations of patriotic behavior and the responsibilities that go along with those privileges and immunities.

This is not a left-right divide. For as Pat Buchanan has said, if these U.S. corporations are not loyal to us, why should we be loyal to them?

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

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Corporate America's Sunshine Patriots

by Michael Winship article link

July 21, 2011 | CommonDreams

The People's Budget vs. The Plutocracy

by John Atcheson article link

July 21, 2011 | CommonDreams

Willie Osterweil: A Global Fight for Radical Democracy

2011-07-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

Yes We Camp: A Global Fight for Radical Democracy

by Willie Osterweil article link article link

July 19, 2011 | CommonDreams | Shareable

Millenials all over the world have received a brutal political education. The lucky few of us paid far more and will get far less for our college degrees than any generation before, we have watched with dismay as our parents squabble over light bulbs while the seas boil, and we have witnessed the steady erosion of public space, individual rights, the fourth estate, and checks on executive power. America has been at war for basically the entire adult lives of everyone under 30. The financial collapse of 2008 seemed to catch Baby Boomers by surprise, but for us, it was just another news story, a predictable event in a world spinning out of control. We have also grown up with racial and sexual tolerance as the norm (if not the rule), with communication and information constantly at our fingertips, and in a world where, though crises are shared globally, so is community.

We have seen the house of cards start to tremble, we have watched our future sold to the lowest bidder, and we see it happening everywhere at once.

Out of this potentially nihilistic morass a serious movement for change is emerging. Though it would be disingenuous to call it a youth movement – it’s too big for that – Millenials have been at the vanguard in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, and Spain. We have developed new tactics, new ideologies, new ideas, and we’ve done it fast. Though strategies and expressions have varied to match cultural and national contexts, the movements share striking similarities. These movements have no leaders, no major political parties, no rigid ideologies and no demands beyond total, real, democracy.

“Yes We Camp,” one of the witty twitter hashtags of Spain’s 15 May movement, sums things up well. Inspired by the Arab Spring, galvanized by crisis, unemployment and austerity, fed up with the ineffective, corrupt, and often misanthropic political process, we are leaving our homes and moving to the street. In a blend of last-chance desperation and optimistic empowerment, we are building autonomous, totally democratic camps in city centers across the world. In these camps total inclusive democracy is praxis, everything is shared, and we build revolutionary consciousness everyday.

Perhaps no country is better suited to the radical democratic camps than Spain. A relatively young democracy, Spain has a rich political history of autonomous revolt and a strong cultural tradition of shared outdoor space. With unemployment hovering around 25 percent, and youth unemployment above 40 percent, a decade long housing bubble as dramatic as that in the US, and a series of dramatic cuts to social services being pushed by the EU and the ‘socialist’ Zapatero government, Los Indignados have over 60 percent popular support. I’ve discussed the history of the movement and life in the camps for Shareable before, but I’d like to zero in on the political methods and practices I witnessed (and took part in, to a limited extent) in Barcelona’s Placa Catalunya.

The camp is fundamentally organized around the principle of the General Assembly. If you’ve been in any kind of leftist meeting you have an idea of how it works: someone volunteers to be meeting facilitator, and people raise their hands to get on the ‘stack’. The facilitator calls on people in the order they volunteered, and only one person speaks at a time. They seek consensus rather than majority rule: all of the meetings I witnessed ended with dissenters agreeing to proposals and accepting the decision of the group. In a majority vote, voters are presented with a yes/no question and 51 percent carries the day, but in General Assembly proposals are built during conversation and debate, and as such actually reflect the desires of the group as a whole.

From the general assembly Los Indignados formed commissions, which focus on specific issues and questions within the camp, such as communication, international press, infrastructure, and food. These commissions set up their own booths and tents, where they work and remain available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to speak with the public walking through the square. Commissions all have their own assemblies, following the same methods. As such, all actions, choices, and movements are formed from the bottom up, not the top down.

This means, of course, a lot of meetings: it can be boring, and slow, and sometimes frustrating. But everyone takes part in the decision process, and everyone’s voice is listened to, not just heard. During a general assembly on Tuesday the 21st, a group of eleven and twelve year olds marched into the square chanting, to general applause. The assembly was paused to allow the kids to come up on stage and address the camp. What is lost in ideological rigidity you gain in respect, actualization, and consciousness. Democracy is messy, but efficiency is capitalism's catch-phrase.

Everything is shared: decision making, food, labor, information, experience, resources, cigarettes. Placa Catalunya has a free kitchen, daily teach-ins, meeting schedules, public art spaces, a play space for kids, free movie screenings, and much more.

The camps also serve as action and information centers: people form actions large and small from the centralized point, allowing for a fluidity and speed of organization unavailable to other forms of organization. It also allows for simple scalability of involvement: core revolutionaries sleep and live in the camp, some people spend a couple days a week there, others only show up for major protests. This improvisational form of occupation creates a strong but fluid movement open to all and run by the people.

This is a practice of total democracy, of real, revolutionary tolerance. Los Indignados are 100 percent against violence, but they define violence to include homelessness, unemployment, hate speech and other forms of injustice. To quote the popular chant: this is what democracy looks like!

Similarly organized camps can be found throughout Spain, in Athens, and of course Egypt and Tunisia. Smaller camps have been springing up all over the world: England, Iceland, Italy, and France, throughout South America, even some in Japan and South Korea.

They’ve been appearing here in the US too. After the people were kicked out of the capitol building in Madison, they spontaneously organized Walkerville, an anti-Walker camp and protest space. I am writing these words from Bloombergville, the New York City encampment built to fight Bloomberg’s 2012 budget. A camp sprung up in San Jose this week, and Boston last week. A group called “American Spring” has planned camps for next month in Pheonix, San Fransisco, San Jose, and across the Southwest, and a major anti-war encampment is planned for Washington D.C, slated to start on October 6.

It’s not clear whether all of these camps can succeed in their goals, but it is totally clear that this method is capable of transforming consciousness (particularly among millenials) and making a better future seem not only possible, but plausible. This is the new method of resistance, revolt and democracy developed by a generation with nothing to lose and everything to gain. We will be seeing many more of these camps before this crisis is over, and one may well be coming to your city. If it’s not, get your friends together, find points of unity, and grab your sleeping bags.

Willie Osterweil is a writer and punk singer based in Brooklyn, NY. When he's not overseas taking part in revolutions, Willie edits the A/V section for The New Inquiry and fronts the band Vulture Shit.

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Neoliberalism, Austerity, and the Global Crisis of Legitimacy

by Chris Maisano article link article link

July 19, 2011 | CommonDreams | The Activist

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The Never-Ending Depression

The Economy Can Only Recover If We Repudiate the Debt

by Washington's Blog article link article link

July 20, 2011 | Global Research | Washington's Blog

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The Class Politics of the US Debt Ceiling Crisis

by Patrick Martin article link article link

July 20, 2011 | Global Research | WSWS

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Balance the Budget on the Backs of Billionaires

by David Swanson article link

July 20, 2011 | OpEdNews

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Mary Bottari: ALEC Exposed

2011-07-19T09:57:00.000-07:00

ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors

by Mary Bottari article link Uprising Radio

July 19, 2011 | CommonDreams | PRWatch | Uprising Radio

Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term "disaster capitalism" for the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing -- from energy and water utilities to Social Security -- to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.

Now, U.S. states are in crisis. The 2008 Wall Street financial meltdown, caused by years of deregulation and lack of government oversight, cost Americans $14 trillion in lost wealth and eight million lost jobs. Today some 25 million are unemployed or underemployed. This jobs crisis has tanked federal and state tax receipts, adding billions to state budget shortfalls.

As the prime movers of this deregulatory agenda, the GOP spin machine has launched into hyper-drive in an attempt to wash the blood from their hands. Governors across the nation, backed by Wall Street's Club for Growth and the Koch Brother's Americans for Prosperity, are working hard to convince average Americans that a jobs crisis is actually a deficit crisis and that the culprits are not the big banks on Wall Street, but state, county and municipal workers.

In lockstep, governors are reaching for an almost identical set of "solutions," to their financial woes: massive tax breaks for big corporations, constitutional amendments to prevent states from raising revenue, the slashing of critical public services, the busting of unions and the privatization of every possible aspect of government including public schools -- long a Friedman agenda item. (See the video here.)

The similarity of these measures has not gone unnoticed, but now we have found the fountainhead of these radical measures: the American Legislative Exchange Council. (ALEC)

ALEC Exposed

This week the Center for Media and Democracy made available to the public over 800 ALEC "model" bills and resolutions on a new website, ALECexposed.org. We display the documents, crafted by corporations, and right-wing state legislators behind closed doors, so that citizens across the country can now trace the origins of many of the radical proposals moving in their states. (Our site contains lists of ALEC members, corporations, task forces, scholars, funders and more.)

Milton Friedman famously said: "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." Think of ALEC as Milton Friedman's little shop of horrors where legislators across the country can easily access the "ideas laying around."

ALEC is not a lobby, and it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Behind closed doors, corporations hand legislators the law changes they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Corporations are "equal" members. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. Corporations and trade groups fund almost all of ALEC's operations directly through hefty membership dues and indirectly through corporate foundations, like the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

Corporations, like Koch Industries, Phillip Morris, Reynolds, Kraft, Wal-Mart, Bayer, Coca Cola, State Farm and more, sit on ALEC task forces and vote with state legislators to approve "model" bills in secret. They wine and dine legislators at swank hotels, with child care provided, fundraisers and other perks pre-arranged. After a swell time, participating legislators -- overwhelmingly conservative Republicans -- bring the bills home and introduce them into statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations. ALEC cuts out the middleman and the state legislators themselves become "super lobbyists" for the ALEC agenda.

Disaster Capitalism in the States

In December of 2008, while the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, one group was treating the catastrophe as a terrific opportunity. Governor Mitch Daniels reminded an ALEC gathering that the collapse of the U.S. economy was "a terrific time to shrink government!"

In 2010, Republicans won the governorship and control of both houses in 21 states. ALEC shock troops swung into high gear. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Maine a steady stream of bills emerged from Milton Friedman's shop.

Starving State Government of Revenue to Make It Dysfunctional and Despised: ALEC members are introducing hundreds of bills to grant tax breaks to big corporations and to cripple state's ability to raise revenue, including new constitutional rules to limiting state taxing powers. Grover Norquist would love these lethal proposals.

Privatizing Schools and Other Government Services: ALEC bills encompass over 20 years of effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding school voucher system, to turn Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs,and to privatize almost all aspects of government including toll roads and bridges, pensions, foster care and prisons. Foreign firms like Maquarie and Cintra, which are snapping up U.S. roads and bridges, are also using ALEC to push model bills.

Race to the Bottom in Wages for Americans: ALEC bills would repeal state or local laws that boost workers wages such as "living wage" and prevailing wage laws. ALEC bills call a starting minimum wage an "unfunded mandate" but think that prison labor is just terrific. ALEC also supports a radical "free trade" agenda that sends U.S. manufacturing and an increasing number of service-sector jobs overseas.

Defunding Traditional Supporters of the Democratic Party: ALEC purports to be nonpartisan, but only 1 of 104 legislators in ALEC's leadership is a Democrat. ALECexposed.org contains dozens of bills to defund public sector and private sector unions and to make it harder for trial lawyers to bring cases when consumers are injured or killed by dangerous products.

Help Needed!

ALEC's agenda is vast. These bills and many more are moving in all 50 states. We need your help! Visit ALECexposed.org today, see the corporations and legislators pursuing this agenda and help us track the bills moving in your state. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter at #ALECexposed and Take Action to tell the ALEC corporate cabal to "Dump ALEC!"

Mary Bottari is the Director of the Center for Media and Democracy's Real Economy Project and editor of their www.BanksterUSA.org site.

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Keynes Cocktail Is No Joke

by Staff Report article link

July 19, 2011 | Daily Bell

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President Obama's Big Deal: Cuts for Social Security, But No Taxes for Wall Street

by Dean Baker article link

July 19, 2011 | CommonDreams | CEPR

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World War Three Is Under Way and YOU Are the Enemy

by Rob Kall article link article link

July 6, 2011 | SCSC | OpEdNews

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How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule

How is it that our nation is awash in money, but too broke to provide jobs and services?

by David Korten article link article link Uprising Radio

July 19, 2011 | CommonDreams | YES! Magazine | Uprising Radio

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The Abundant Community;

John McKnight & Peter Block; Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

The Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show Podcast article/podcast link

Recorded August 25, 2010 | OpEdNews

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Richard Clark: A Road to Serfdom

2011-07-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

Global Economic Crisis: The Ultimate Goal of the Bankster-led Political-economic Warfare Being Waged Against Us Is ... ?

by Richard Clark article link

July 14, 2011 | OpEdNews

As economist Michael Hudson points out, the European debt crisis is really the product of financial warfare instigated by big banks. Yes, these banks are engaged in warfare against the rest of society. What's going on in Greece is exactly what's going to happen in America very shortly. Why? Because in every industrialized country, the big banks are in the process of offloading their bad debts onto governments. They are then forcing these governments to sell off national assets so that the bankers can be paid what they consider to be their due. (For more about this, see the linked video at this web site, about Greece being a dress rehearsal for the US.)

In a nutshell, what it says is that the world is being prepared for the kind of "neo-feudalism" that these banksters (intent on ever more completely becoming our masters and lords) intend to implement. And so it is that America is in the early stages of being subjected to the same type of plundering as Greece and Ireland.

As Hudson explained in 2008, what these banksters and their cohorts are really trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions that embody such legislation. They're not trying to make the economy more equal, and they're not trying to share power -- just the opposite: Their aim is to implement a kind of pre-industrial and even feudal socioeconomic system. What this means is that our economy is being pushed back and put on the road to debt peonage. Hence forth, most manufacturing will be done in Asia and Europe.

What we have here, therefore, is indeed a "Road to Serfdom." It is just the opposite of the government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards that we had until Reagan took the White House. Rather, it's the dismantling of democratic government and the dissolution of regulatory agencies, for the purpose of creating this new kind of neo-feudal system. (Don't miss Max Keiser's discussion of this neo-feudalism on the Keiser Report. Just scroll down until you see a picture of economist Michael Hudson on the linked video screen.)

If all this sounds far fetched, consider that Foreign Policy magazine recently ran an article entitled "The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism," arguing that the power of nations is declining, and is being replaced by big banks and other corporations, wealthy individuals, the sovereign wealth funds of monarchs, and city-regions.

Also consider that many progressive economists are now telling us that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth (concentrating ever more of it into the hands of) the bank shareholders and their top executives."

Finally, as the wholly non-partisan Australian economist Steve Keen observed:

"This is the biggest transfer of wealth in history," as the giant banks have handed off their toxic debts (stemming from fraudulent activities) to tax payers in their respective countries. These big banks created bubbles -- using fraud -- because that's the only way they could make the obscene profits they feel they now deserve. (See this for details). And be sure to not miss Max Keiser's interview of Steve Keen here. (Just scroll down until you see Mr. Keen's picture on the linked video screen.)

Indeed, this isn't the "Great Recession", it's the Great Bank Robbery. In simple language, the big banks have pillaged and looted the rest of the world, and now they are beginning to pillage and loot the USA. It is not only Greece that is losing its sovereignty; the big banks are in the process of turning America into a banana republic as well. Remember, the trillions in bailouts went to banks, not to Main Street, and a large percentage of the bailouts went to foreign banks (and see this). And so did most of the money from the second round of quantitative easing.

In short, warfare initiated by the big banks has now gone global. As Warren Buffet, one of America's most successful capitalists and defenders of capitalism, has pointed out, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making that war." And winning it.

Let's not forget that it was inequality that to a large extent caused the Great Depression and that has also caused the current economic crisis. Finally, let's not forget, either, that the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, didn't believe that inequality should be a taboo subject, and that even some conservatives, in addition to most liberals of course, are against rampant inequality. In spite of this, however, polls show that the vast majority of Americans continue to greatly underestimate the amount of inequality that has, in our country, over the past 30 years, been generated. Most remain largely unaware of the colossal crime that has been committed against them.

That lack of awareness we must bring to an end.

Richard Clark: Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've always been more interested in political economics and what's going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I've rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most. Web site http://www.techeditingservices.com/

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Global Economic Crisis: Finance Is the New Mode of Warfare

by Prof. Michael Hudson article link program link(mp3) article link

July 18, 2011 | Global Research | Guns and Butter (KPFA) | ICH

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Sitting Atop Trillions: What Would Business Do with Another Tax Break?

by Joseph Dwyer article link article link

July 18, 2011 | CommonDreams | Policy Shop

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Reading the Debt Ceiling Tea Leaves to Predict the Future

by Jack Rasmus article link

July 18, 2011 | Truthout

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Bob Chapman: Financial Crimes on Wall Street and the Debt Crisis

2011-07-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

Financial Crimes on Wall Street and the Debt Crisis

Crisis And Collapse Unfortunate but Inevitable

by Bob Chapman article link article link

July 16, 2011 | Global Research | International Forecaster

Crime on Wall Street, in banking and in corporate America pays. One just neither admits or denies and lets the corporate shareholders pay the fines. These are today’s untouchable, who steal billions and get away with it. Financial institutions are too big to fail, as are their key employees.

To a great extent fraud and other criminal behavior caused the credit crisis and lack of recovery that we have witnessed over the last 5 years. We have had top officers of firms see their companies headed for trouble and with this inside knowledge they have cashed out their share holdings. Then there were the predatory lenders, syndicators of bonds, which contained mortgages, now known as toxic waste, that were criminally given AAA ratings when they deserved BBB. We had some 1,000 corporate officers who backdated their options. Only one was criminally prosecuted when they all should have been.

Prosecutions have come few and for between, because the SEC, CFTC and the Justice Department aid and abet these crooks in order to keep harmony in the system, which is coming unglued. They have always done this, but over the past 5 years even the uneducated can see what has and is taking place. In fact the more outrageous the crime, the less it is liable to be pursued. This non-pursuit of crime needless to say encourages more crime and further damages overall corporate and financial sectors. There is no accountability and we see none in the future. Let there be no mistake this financial crisis is worse than the last depression. This continuing degenerative process can only assist in a further degeneration of the system.

A bill has been introduced by Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, that would change IRS regulations that allow American traders of credit default swaps to avoid paying federal taxes on transactions initiated in the US. It would tighten rules that enable some hedge funds and US corporations to reduce federal tax liabilities by declaring themselves foreign companies and moving a small part of their operations overseas. It would require companies to provide the SEC and the public, with a country-by-country breakdown of their sales, employment and operations.

Senator Levin says that abuse of offshore havens cost American taxpayers $100 billion a year. Presently American transnational conglomerates have more than $2 trillion stashed offshore waiting for another tax break like the one five years ago that allowed them to bring $350 billion home at 5-1/4% instead of regular taxation of 35%. That works out to about $600 billion lost to the Treasury. Gains from traders would be $20 billion over ten years. The removal of these tax breaks would certainly help cut the budget deficit.

The crisis in Greece is finally causing contagion in Italy. The crisis of all six near bankrupt euro nations is upon us and it is permanent. Moody’s just downgraded Ireland again, at the worst possible time. Spain, which is in terrible shape, will soon follow. The EU members and their controllers, the banks, keep trying to put band-aids on their festering problem. Sooner or later they will have to face the music and that is those six nations will all have to go bankrupt along with the banks. All of you subscribers in the EU and UK get your funds out of the bank, now, and into gold and silver coins. If you don’t you may end up with nothing. If this goes on long enough it will take the presently solvent nations down as well.

The European Union and the euro zone were ill conceived and bound to failure. After having lived in Europe for years, and being able to speak several of their languages, you get to understand people and the way they think. Both entities were anthropologically unnatural. Europe is still tribal. Just look at countries like Germany, France and Belgium where people speak different variations of the same language. In Belgium they speak two distinct languages. The EU’s major flaw was sovereign countries ran their own fiscal policies, as bureaucrats ran the EU. You have to either federalize all the way or forget it. The euro zone foisted one interest rate fits all, all on countries that should have never had the same interest rates as say Germany. We talked about both these issues 14 years ago, but as usual, no one was listening. From the very beginning the EU and the euro zone were doomed. Both are going to now begin the process of disintegration, as both are a failure. The six countries will go bankrupt, as will the banks. That will dislodge England and push it into bankruptcy and that in turn will force the US to follow. That may be the catalyst that forces a meeting of all nations to revalue, devalue and multilaterally default, hopefully such a meeting will occur long before this stage is reached. There is no question now that the game is over. The question now is when?

Workers have become a form of inventory just like widgets. For years now companies have laid off and rehired workers at will, keeping the expensive worker participation to a minimum. If you use total figures and include discouraged workers the unemployed are 20.6 million, up 483,000 in June. We do not see stimulus 3 coming from Congress, so we expect unemployment to resume its relentless rise upward from 22.6%. Mind you unemployment reflects $1.7 trillion in stimulus 1 and 2, and QE 1 and QE 2, which takes us well over 44 trillion. All those injections did was to bail out the financial sector and government. As we know our President tells us the administration created three million jobs, at a cost of $266,000 per job. That is hardly something to write home about. Corporate America is in excellent financial shape, but they will be slow to hire until they see a firm recovery in place. Sure GE made $17 million, because they did not pay taxes as we do, but they won’t rush out to hire unless the reason to hire exists. The real opportunity to hire has to be with small business that hires 70% of Americans. They do not enjoy the tax-free status of GE. Most of these small companies are barely hanging on. These are the companies that banks won’t loan too. Half of them are still experiencing falling profits, only 20% are doing well.

Year-on-year in the municipal sector 450,000 workers are going to lose their jobs, because many of these entities are close to broke. They and the states want more money from the federal government, which it doesn’t have to give. Large, very profitable businesses generally create very few jobs. They and mid-sized companies are buying more and more labor saving equipment, or they are moving production offshore. For the last three years most of the new jobs paid subsistence wages. Those are $8.00 to $11.00 an hour jobs, which are really part-time providing a 34.3-hour week, as inflation roars ahead up 10.6% and headed up to 14% by yearend. The average duration of unemployment is at an all-time high and 44% unemployed have been out work six months or more, at an all-time high.

We had a gentlemen call in on one of our programs, he has a masters and had been out of work for four years. He went to a company and told management he would work for nothing in order to learn to operate a forklift. After training he got a job doing that work at a plumbing company. He has the distinction of beating out 26 other applicants. He has been told in 1-1/2 years they will be an opening for him in accounting, his major. This is the state of America today, as our transnational conglomerates ship our jobs out of the country every day.

We figure a debt extension bill is on the way, but it will only cut $150 to $200 billion a year in government spending, hardly an accomplishment. If the Fed does not inject $850 billion into the economy we are looking at a minus 3% to 5% in GDP. That is in addition to buying $1.7 trillion in treasuries and other associated toxic waste.

The newest recession began a few months ago, or should we say downturn in an inflationary depression. There will be no recovery this year or next without $850 billion additional being thrown into the economy. No 3.5% growth. Perhaps a minus 4% if we are lucky. That should put unemployment close to 25% by 2012. After the news comes out that the term debt deal has been done the stock market will begin to slip downward.

As this transpires we see a million more foreclosures and more the following year. In order for the economy to revive housing it has to revive and we see absolutely no chance of that happening over the next two years. As the Fed supplies buckets of money and credit inflation will scream upward. 25% to 30% is already in the pipeline for next year via QE and Stimulus 2. There is no way that can be stopped. That will be added to by the results of QE 3 in 2013. We wish it won’t be this way, but it is.

There has been an inevitability since August 15,1971, that America and the western world would move from crisis to crisis until the financial and economic system eventually collapsed.

For those who have been objective over those years what we are seeing today is no surprise.

No one in America wants the merry-go-round to stop. Americans are not prepared to face the music. They naturally want more debt creation, but interestingly by 70%, they did not want a short-term debt extension. That is understandably confusing and the reason is that when it comes to economy and finance they are really in the dark. What they truly do not understand along with much of Wall Street is that the debt problem is much worse and deeper then they believe.

The problems in Europe are never ending. The solvent countries are discovering what we discovered a year ago May. The cost of the six-country bailout we projected at $4 trillion. A month ago we increased that to $4 to $6 trillion. When we said $4 trillion Germany said $1 trillion. This past week they said $3.5 trillion. We wonder why it took them so long to catch up. As of this writing the Greeks have signed a bailout deal but the lenders still do not know what they want to do. They are finally reaching the realization that they cannot be serviced never mind be repaid. You can cut wages and spending 40% or 50% and not expect revenues to fall. That means the bankers get paid and no one else does. That is what Wall Street’s game is all about.

Bob Chapman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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‘Let ‘Em Eat Peas’: An Elitist Mantra for Our Age

by Donna Smith article link

July 17, 2011 | CommonDreams

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Blowing It: Democrats, Unable to Be a Party of the People, are Sinking Themselves

by Dave Lindorff article link

July 17, 2011 | CommonDreams

The Morality of Gold

by Anthony Wile article link

July 16, 2011 | Daily Bell

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The Greater Depression Is Upon Us

by David Galland article link

July 16, 2011 | Silver Bear Cafe

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Smecker/Jensen: You Can't Kill a Planet and Live on It, Too

2011-07-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

You Can't Kill a Planet and Live on It, Too

by Frank Joseph Smecker and Derrick Jensen article link

July 16, 2011 | Truthout

Let's expose the structure of violence that keeps the world economy running.

With an entire planet being slaughtered before our eyes, it's terrifying to watch the very culture responsible for this - the culture of industrial civilization, fueled by a finite source of fossil fuels, primarily a dwindling supply of oil - thrust forward wantonly to fuel its insatiable appetite for "growth."

Deluded by myths of progress and suffering from the psychosis of technomania complicated by addiction to depleting oil reserves, industrial society leaves a crescendo of atrocities in its wake. A very partial list would include the Bhopal chemical disaster, numerous oil spills, the illegal depleted uranium-spewing occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, mountaintop removal, the nuclear meltdown of Fukushima, the permanent removal of 95 percent of the large fish from the oceans (not to mention full-on systemic collapse of those oceans), indigenous communities replacement by oil wells, the mining of coltan for cell phones and Playstations along the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Rwanda border - resulting in tribal warfare and the near-extinction of the Eastern Lowland gorilla.

As though 200 species going extinct each day were not enough, climate change, a direct result of burning fossil fuels, has proved not only to be as unpredictable as it is real, but as destructive as it is unpredictable. The erratic and lethal characteristics of a changing planet and its shifting atmosphere are becoming the norm of the 21st century, their impact accelerating at an alarming pace, bringing this planet closer, sooner than later, to a point of uninhabitable ghastliness. And yet, collective apathy, ignorance and self-imposed denial in the face of all this sadistic exploitation and violence marches this culture closer to self-annihilation.

Lost in the eerily comforting fantasy of limitless growth, production and consumption, many people cling to things like Facebook, Twitter, "Jersey Shore" and soulless pop music as if their lives depended on it, identifying with a reality that's artificial and constructed, that panders to desire rather than necessity, that delicately conceals the violence at the other end of this economy, a violence so widespread that we're all not only complicit in it to a degree (e.g., if you're a taxpayer, you help subsidize the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction), but victims of it as well. As Chris Hedges admonished in his books, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy" and the "Triumph of Spectacle," any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill itself.

Moreover, any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill everything and everyone else in its path as well as itself.

As the world burns, as species die off, as mothers breastfeed their children with dioxin-tainted breast milk, as nuclear reactors melt down into the Pacific while the aerial deployment of depleted uranium damages innocent lives, it is perplexing that so few people fight back against a system that has horror as a reality for most living on the planet. And those who fight back, who stand in opposition to the culture behind such wholesale abuse and call it what it is - a genocidal mega-state (especially if you believe that the lives of nonhumans are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me) - are met with hostility and hatred, scoffed at, harassed, even tortured. With so much at stake, why aren't more people deafening their ears to the nutcases who preach a future of infinite-growth economies? And why do so many people continue to put "the economy" first, to take industrial capitalism as we know it as a given and not fight back, defend what's left of the natural world?

"One of the reasons there aren't more people working to take down the system that's killing the planet is because their lives depend on the system," author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me from his home in California when I interviewed him on the phone recently. "If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them," Jensen explained. "If your experience, however, is that your food comes from a land base and that your water comes from a stream, well, then you will defend to the death that land base and that stream. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.

"The other problem is that fear is the belief we have something left to lose. What I mean by this is that I really like my life right now, as do a lot of people. We have a lot to lose if this culture is to go down. A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war - or even acknowledge that it's going on - is that we materially benefit from this war's plunder. I'm really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet."

Even in the absence of global warming, this culture would still be murdering the planet, bumping off pods of whales and flocks of birds; detonating mountaintops to access strata of coal and bauxite, eliminating entire ecosystems. All this violence inflicted upon an entire planet to run an economy based on the foolish and immoral notion that we can sustain industrial societies, all while trashing the planet's land bases, ecosystems and life. And the fantastic rhetoric those who insist on adapting to these changes promulgate - that technology will find a fix, that we can adapt, that the planet can and will conform to fixes in the market - is dangerous.

"Another part of the problem," Jensen told me, "is the narratives behind this culture's way of living. The premises of these narratives grant us the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet. Whether you subscribe to the religion of Science or of Christianity, these narratives tell us that our intelligence and abilities permit us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is here for us to use. The problem with these stories, whether you believe in them or not, is that they have real effects on the physical world. The stories we're told about the world shape the way we perceive the world and the way we perceive the world shapes the way we behave in the world. The stories of industrial capitalism - that we can sustain infinite-growth economies - shapes the way this culture behaves in the world. And this behavior is killing the planet. Whether the stories we are told are fantasies or not doesn't matter, what matters is that these narratives are physical: the stories of Christianity may be fantasy - let's pretend for a moment that God doesn't exist - well, the Crusades still happened; the notion of race or gender may be up for debate, but obviously, race and gender does matter and this postmodern attitude drives me crazy because, yeah, race and gender is not an actual thing, but it all has real-world effects - African Americans comprise 58 percent of the prison population and one-third of all black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some sort of criminal justice supervision; as for gender, well real males rape females.

"Another example [of how things that truly aren't real still have real-world effects]," Jensen continued, "is there was this serial killer a while back who was killing women in Santa Cruz. Voices in his head were telling him that if he didn't kill these women, then California would slide off into the ocean. It's apparent this guy was delusional, a total nut job and sick in the head, but his delusions still resulted in real-world effects. Hitler too had the delusion that Jews were poisoning the race. That delusion had real-world effects. And we can sit around and discuss whether Weyerhaeuser truly exists, but forests still get deforested. Or better yet, it's pretty clear that it's silly to really believe that the world won't run out of oil ... and then it's suddenly clear that it's not so silly - there is a physical reality. In the real world, you can't have a nature/culture split, but in this culture you do and it has real effects on the physical world. You can't live on a planet and kill it at the same time."

You find the problem with an industrial production economy when you unpack the word "production." As Jensen makes clear in his book "The Culture of Make Believe," production is essentially the conversion of the living to the dead: animals into cold cuts, mountains and rivers into aluminum beer cans, trees into toilet paper, oil into plastics and computers (one computer uses ten times its own mass in fossil fuels). To go paperless is not to go green, or maybe it is, depending on what shade of Green we're talking about here. Basically, every commodity one comes in contact with is soaked in oil, made from resources, marked by, as Jensen puts it, the turning of the living to the dead: Industrial production.

And with conflicts and wars that are waged or instigated by this culture to access (steal) the resources needed to fuel this economy's colossal machines, this culture winds up butchering entire non-industrialized communities of people ... the elderly, children who cling to their mothers as drones hawk over staggered onlookers ... the innocent and vulnerable written off as "collateral damage." Himmler used a similar epithet for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, and other Slavic peoples in a pamphlet he edited and had distributed by the SS Race and Settlement Head Office: "Untermenschen."

This is an acceptable price we must pay it, so we are told.

In the US, more lives are lost weekly from preventable cancers and other illnesses than are lost in ten years from terrorist attacks. And the corporations this culture fights for overseas are the very organizations culpable for these domestic deaths every week.

The list of victims whose lives are subject to violent assault and extinction to feed this culture's "production" is as long and as diverse as you want to make it.

"An infinite-growth economy is not only insane and impossible," remarked Jensen, "it's also abusive, by which I mean that it's based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators. And a successful abuser will always ensure that there are some 'benefits' for the victim, in this case, e.g., we can watch TV, we can have computer access and play games online - we get 'benefits' that essentially keep us in line.

"Furthermore, according to the stories of industrial capitalism, this economic system must constantly increase production to grow and what, after all, is production? It is indeed the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks and ultimately all of these into money. And really, what is gross national product? It's a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. And these simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.

"And if we take global warming into consideration here - oh and I believe the latest study on global warming mentioned something along the lines of the planet now being on track to heat up by 29 degrees in the next eighty years ... if that isn't curtailed immediately, no one will survive that ... And so all the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given. And here we see the same old abusive behavior: the narratives are not only created around the perceptions of the perpetrators, i.e. those in power, but are forced upon us by them as well, so we come to believe the narratives and accept them as a given. And, essentially, to take industrial capitalism as a given when it comes to solutions to global warming is absolutely absurd and insane. It's out of touch with physical reality. Yet it has disastrous effects on the real physical world. If you force a planet to conform to ideology you get what you get.

"A while back I had a conversation with an anarchist who was complaining that I was 'too ideological,' and that my ideology was 'the health of the earth.' Well, actually, the earth is not and cannot ever be an ideology. The earth is physical. It is real. And it is primary. Without soil, you don't have a healthy land base and without a healthy land base you don't eat, you die. Without drinkable clean water you die."

And this is one of the problems with our culture: its lack of ability to separate ideology - the kind that accommodates maximizing pleasure and domination - from the needs of the natural world. And, so, if solutions to global warming do not immediately address the basic needs of the planet, well ... we're fucked.

"One has to ask," pressed Jensen, "if hammerhead sharks could provide solutions, if the indigenous could give solutions and if we would listen to the solutions they are already giving, would these solutions take industrial capitalism as a given? The bottom line is that capitalist solutions to global warming are coming from the capitalist boosters, from those in power who are responsible for exploiting and destroying us and more importantly, the planet."

By the 1940s, in Germany, Arthur Nebe's gassing van was in wide use. Those who drove Nebe's death vans never thought of themselves as murderers, just as another somebody getting paid to drive a van, to do a job. Today, those who work for Boeing, Raytheon, Weyerhaeuser, Exxon Mobil, BP, the Pentagon ... will always see themselves as employees, not murderers. They will always see themselves as working a job that needs to be done.

Those members of this culture who blindly go along without interrogating the culture's narratives, who identify with the pathology of this culture, will always see themselves as just other members of society. For these people, the murder of a planet feels like economics; it feels normal after having been pushed out of consciousness by careers, styles and fashions; it may not even feel like anything at all after being psychically numbed by pop radio, sitcoms, smart phones, video games ... But at the other end of all these glittery distractions is an unremitting array of violence, poverty, extinction, environmental degradation.

"I saw this right-wing bumper sticker the other day that read, 'You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,' but it's not just guns: we're going to have to pry rigid claws off steering wheels, cans of hair spray, TV remote controls and two-liter bottles of Jolt Cola," cautioned Jensen. "Each of these individually and all of these collectively are more important to many people than are lampreys, salmon, spotted owls, sturgeons, tigers, our own lives. And that is a huge part of the problem. So of course we don't want to win. We'd lose our cable TV. But I want to win. With the world being killed, I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win."

When Adolph Eichmann stood before the Jerusalem District Court and was asked why he agreed to the task of deporting Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps, his response was, No one ever told me what I was doing was wrong. Today, 200 species have become extinct; another indigenous community will disappear from this planet forever; an entire forest will be removed; and millions of human lives will be forced to endure the agonies of famine, war, disease, thirst, the loss of their land, their community, their way of life. Not enough people have stepped forward to say that what this culture is doing to the planet is wrong.

Well, here it is folks: What this culture is doing to our very selves, what it's doing to the planet, is wrong. So damn wrong. And the sooner we replace this economy, the sooner we can dissolve these toxic illusions and their formative narratives. Only then, can we begin to live the free lives we were born to live and win the fight.

Derrick Jensen has been called the poet philosopher of the ecological movement. He has written some 15 books critiquing contemporary society and the destruction of the environment.

Frank Joseph Smecker is a freelance writer and philosophy/English major at the University of Vermont. His work has appeared in: Truthout.org, Z Magazine, Rain Taxi, Counterpunch, The Ecologist, Counter Currents, Petroleum World, Fifth Estate, and elsewhere.

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John W. Whitehead: The Military Industrial Complex

2011-07-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy from Within

By John W. Whitehead article link article link

July 11, 2011 | Rutherford Institute | ICH

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” --James Madison

“When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don't even get good oleo. These are facts of life.” -- Martin Luther King Jr.

If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off, and Americans would do well to keep that in mind as Congress and the White House debate whether or not to raise the debt ceiling from its current high of $14.3 trillion. For one thing, the grandstanding by both parties over health care costs and Social Security is nothing more than a convenient distraction from the glaring economic truth that at the end of the day, it’s not the sick, the elderly or the poor who are stealing us blind and pushing America towards bankruptcy. It’s the military industrial complex (the illicit merger of the armaments industry and the Pentagon) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago and which has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)--and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe. Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

War is not cheap. Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.2 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That number, however, is probably closer to $2.7 trillion when you add in the war in Pakistan and other hidden costs, and will likely climb to $4.4 trillion before it’s all over. Additionally, the American military industrial complex is spending roughly $4 million per day on the unconstitutional war in Libya.

Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. Just consider the fact that the annual cost to support one U.S. servicemember in Afghanistan alone is over $1 million, with fuel costs making up the bulk of the expenses. Of course, one of the reasons for the high cost of maintaining each soldier can be attributed to the lack of governmental oversight of private contractor billings, which are rampant with fraud, waste and fat.

War--or the art of killing--has unfortunately become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers. Not only does the U.S. have the largest defense budget, it also ranks highest as the world’s largest arms exporter. According to a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks military expenditures worldwide, the arms industry is thriving despite the ongoing global economic recession. In fact, 45 of the top 100 of the world’s largest arms-producing companies are based in the U.S. These U.S. corporations generated just under $247 billion in 2009, which constituted 61% of total arms sales internationally.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

In the process, billions have been spent erecting luxury military installations throughout the world. For example, the U.S. Embassy built in Iraq, dubbed "Fortress Baghdad," covers 104 acres and boasts a "city within a city" that includes six apartment buildings, a Marine barracks, swimming pool, shops and 15-foot-thick walls. Camp Anaconda in Iraq, like many U.S. military bases scattered across the globe, was structured to resemble a mini-city with pools, fast food restaurants, miniature golf courses and movie theaters. In economic terms, the money invested in building these bases amounts to what American University professor Gordon Adams describes as “sunk” costs. “We're seeing this in Iraq,” said Adams. “We're turning over to the Iraqis -- mostly either for a small penny or for free -- the infrastructure that we built in Iraq. But we won't see back any money from that infrastructure.”

Unfortunately, Americans have been inculcated with a false, misplaced sense of patriotism about the military that equates devotion to one’s country with supporting the war machine so that any mention of cutting back on the massive defense budget is immediately met with outrage. Yet they might be surprised to learn that little of the money being spent on so-called defense is actually being used for national defense. According to the Task Force on a Unified Security Budget, the FY2012 budget approved by the House of Representatives allocates 87 percent of security money for “offense” (military forces), only 7 percent for “defense” (homeland security), and only 6 percent for “prevention” (all non-military tools, such as diplomacy, foreign aid, and non-proliferation).

Sadly, those in uniform are being used as convenient fronts for a military industrial complex that is bilking taxpayers out of billions of dollars in questionable defense spending. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. For instance, a study by the Government Accountability Office found that $70 billion worth of cost overruns by the Pentagon were caused by management failures. To put that in perspective, that equates to one and a half times the State Department’s entire $47 billion annual budget.

Fraud is rampant. A government audit, for example, found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

Of course, this kind of rampant abuse is ludicrous, and never more so than at a time when unemployment is topping 9.2%. When most Americans can scarcely afford the cost of cooling their own homes, taxpayers should be up in arms over having to pay through the nose to the tune of $20 billion--more than NASA’s entire annual budget--to air condition the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. “In essence, what we're doing is we’re air conditioning the desert over there in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places,” noted retired brigadier general Steven Anderson, a former chief logistician for Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. And if you think gas prices at home are high, just consider what the American taxpayer is being forced to shell out overseas: once all the expenses of delivering gas to troops in the field are factored in, we’re paying between $18-30 per gallon for gas in Iraq and Afghanistan. Incredibly, despite reports of corruption, abuse and waste, the mega-corporations behind much of this ineptitude and corruption continue to be awarded military contracts worth billions of dollars.

The rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, but the one that remains constant is that those who run the government are feeding the appetite of the military industrial complex. And what began in 2001 as part of an alleged effort to root out al Qaeda has turned into a goldmine for the military industrial complex. Even the lip service that is paid to drawing down the troops doesn’t amount to much of a savings in the end when you factor in the cost of replacing those troops with civilian contractors. For example, while the Obama administration was touting the withdrawal of troops from Iraq earlier this year, plans were being made to triple the size of the private security contractors and support staff to between 7,000 and 8,000.

Just consider: the Pentagon in 2008 spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earned in a year. And yet Congress and the White House want taxpayers to accept that the only way to reduce the nation’s ballooning deficit and avoid raising the debt ceiling is by cutting “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare. As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized, under a military empire, war and its profiteering will always take precedence over the people’s basic human needs.

Incredibly, if the government would just take the amount spent on the war in Afghanistan this year alone ($122 billion in FY2011) and reallocate it where it’s needed here at home, it would entirely wipe out the projected budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2012 for 41 states and the District of Columbia, totaling $103 billion. Or to put it another way: in roughly 80% of the states projecting deficits this year, if the money spent by each state on the war were used for domestic purposes, it would wipe out that state’s shortfall.

Simply put, we cannot afford to maintain our over-extended military empire. As a senior administration official involved in Afghanistan remarked to the Washington Post: “Money is the new 800-pound gorilla. It shifts the debate from ‘Is the strategy working?’ to ‘Can we afford this?’ And when you view it that way, the scope of the mission that we have now is far, far less defensible.” Or as one commentator noted, “Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it.”

Finally, and inevitably, military empires collapse. The war bell is tolling, and it tolls for us. As Cullen Murphy, author of Are We Rome? and editor-at-large of Vanity Fair writes:

A millennium hence America will be hard to recognize. It may not exist as a nation-state in the form it does now--or even exist at all. Will the transitions ahead be gradual and peaceful or abrupt and catastrophic? Will our descendants be living productive lives in a society better than the one we inhabit now? Whatever happens, will valuable aspects of America’s legacy weave through the fabric of civilizations to come? Will historians someday have reason to ask, Did America really fall?

The problem we wrestle with is none other than a distorted American empire, complete with mega-corporations, security-industrial complexes and a burgeoning military. And it has its sights set on absolute domination. Yet at the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise, and it is feared that America, by repeating Rome’s mistakes, is headed toward a similar collapse. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts, “the United States will within a very short time face financial or even political collapse at home and a significantly diminished ability to project force abroad.”

Moreover, the so-called American empire faces a violent contradiction between its long republican tradition and its more recent imperial ambitions. As Chalmers Johnson writes:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

I would suggest that what we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government--i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers--and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world. And as we have seen with the militarizing of the police, the growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad affects the basic principles upon which American society should operate. The military does not view the Constitution in the same way as someone engaged in ensuring that the Bill of Rights and its freedoms are kept intact. Those in the military are primarily trained to conduct warfare, not preserve the peace. We must keep in mind that a military empire will be ruled not by lofty ideals of equality and justice but by the power of the sword.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book The Freedom Wars (TRI Press) is available online at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org

Rutherford Institute commentaries by John W. Whitehead

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Chris Marsden: The Rampant Criminality of the Corporate and Political Elite

2011-07-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Rampant Criminality of the Corporate and Political Elite

Murdoch and the rule of the oligarchy

by Chris Marsden article link article link

July 13, 2011 | Global Research | WSWS

The ongoing exposure of systematic hacking of thousands of phones and computers by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World lifts the lid on the rampant criminality of the corporate and political elite, in Britain and internationally. At least 7,000 people have had their phones hacked and their privacy invaded. The trawl for personal information has targeted a wide range of victims, from politicians and members of the royal family to the families of murder victims and soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

The scandal is revealing the thorough-going decay of democracy and all of the official institutions in Britain, including the major parties, Parliament, the judiciary and the media. The most powerful media corporation in Britain, which constantly trumpets the need for “law and order,” has presided over serious violations of the law, including hacking on what one MP called “an industrial scale.” It has done so year-on-year with virtual impunity.

Murdoch executives and reporters are notorious as well for threatening and bullying politicians and other notables who criticize the operations of News International or otherwise arouse the ire of the Murdoch family.

Now reports have emerged that a News of the World executive destroyed millions of potentially incriminating emails in order to thwart further investigations.

Both of the major parties, Conservative and Labour, are implicated in these crimes, not only because of their refusal to call to account News International, the parent firm of Murdoch’s British media outlets, but because of their intimate relations with Murdoch’s media empire. They never challenged the Metropolitan Police for accepting the patently absurd claim that these illegal practices were the actions of one rogue reporter and a private investigator, even as it surfaced that police officers had received tens of thousands of pounds in bribes from News of the World.

It was only after numerous civil cases had been taken out against the newspaper by celebrities whose phones were hacked that, in January, the Crown Prosecution Service announced it would review material held by police on phone hacking at News of the World to “assess if a fresh criminal trial is likely.”

Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday was forced to acknowledge official collusion with the Murdoch press, stating, “The truth is, we have all been in this together—the press, politicians and leaders of all parties—and yes, that includes me.”

He added, “During the last government, a police investigation was undertaken, it was inadequate and not enough was done. There were reports from the information commissioner and they went unheeded. There were select committee reports on phone hacking and there was no follow-up. Throughout all this, all the warnings, all the concern, the government at the time did nothing. And frankly, neither did the opposition.”

This mea culpa is Cameron’s attempt to limit the damage to his government from the scandal. It came the same morning as the arrest of former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, Cameron’s head of communications until Coulson’s forced resignation in January. However, neither Cameron’s admission of responsibility nor his guarded swipe against former Labour governments do justice to the extent of the incestuous, decades-long relations between the Murdoch empire and Britain’s political elite.

Murdoch is forever associated with the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and above all with Thatcher’s brutal assault on the working class. He cheered on her deregulation of the City of London, privatisations and tax cuts for corporations and the rich from which he benefited more than most. News of the World’s parent company, News International, carried out an infamous union-busting operation, sacking 6,000 print workers and transferring production to Wapping in London’s East End in 1986.

Then, after Murdoch decided that the Tories had exhausted their usefulness as a vehicle for attacking the working class and enriching the ruling elite, he switched support to Labour—which was more than ready to do his bidding. Murdoch dictated government policy to such a degree that Lance Price, a media advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, called Murdoch “the 24th member of the Cabinet.” Price added, “His presence was always felt.”

Murdoch himself has publicly boasted of setting the agenda of the Labour government on Europe and “the breakdown of law and order in Britain.” The Murdoch press has relentlessly promoted wars of aggression, most notably the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair telephoned Murdoch personally on three occasions in the days leading up to the US-British invasion.

Current Labour leader Ed Miliband is now posing as a critic of News of the World, seeking to make political capital out of Cameron’s relations with Coulson and Murdoch press executive Rebakah Brooks. This is a transparent fraud.

The News of the World hacking scandal first came to light in 2006 and was swept under the carpet by the Metropolitan Police, without challenge by the Labour governments of Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown. On April 9, an anonymous ex-minister told the Guardian that Murdoch had “relayed messages to Brown last year via a third party, urging him to help take the political heat out of the row, which he felt was in danger of damaging his company.”

It was only last month that Miliband himself attended News International’s summer party in London, alongside shadow chancellor Ed Balls, two of his closest advisers, Tom Baldwin and Stewart Wood, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper and shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander. The Guardian noted at the time that Labour luminaries outnumbered a Conservative delegation headed by Cameron and his wife, Samantha.

These relations underscore the travesty of the electoral process in Britain. State policy is determined not by the population’s choice to elect a Conservative or Labour government, but by a clique of billionaires that sets the agenda of all the major parties—of which Murdoch is a particularly influential member, thanks to his control of the media.

How does one account for the ability of employees of News International to engage in such rampant criminality without let or hindrance?

The official structures of politics and the media in Britain and internationally have become entirely divorced from and openly hostile to the interests of the general population. They have become the province of a plutocratic layer that acts without legal restraint.

Murdoch himself is widely acknowledged to be the most powerful man in Britain and one of the most powerful people in the world. He is the archetypal representative of a global financial oligarchy that has arisen on the basis of financial parasitism and an unprecedented growth of social inequality.

The narrow layer of the super-rich to which Murdoch belongs has dictated every aspect of political, economic and social life over more than three decades. His 175 or so newspapers and television channels, including Sky in Britain and Fox in the US, are widely viewed as kingmakers inside the political establishment.

Murdoch is the supreme purveyor of a particular type of gutter journalism, whose emphasis on sex scandals and the antics of the rich and famous is meant to divert and confuse the public and encourage the most backward sentiments.

In America, Fox News and the New York Post serve the same function as the Sun, News of the World (which Murdoch shut down on Sunday) and Sky TV in the UK, while the Wall Street Journal editorial page articulates the political agenda of the most reactionary sections of the US ruling elite. The Murdoch media befoul social and intellectual life with an unremitting torrent of right-wing social nostrums, warmongering, national chauvinism, glorification of “free enterprise,” and demands that essential services on which millions rely be slashed.

The most significant expression of the political and ideological putrefaction this has produced is found within the former social democratic parties, such as the British Labour Party. They all easily adapted themselves to Murdoch’s brand of politics, emerging as unabashed defenders of the savage austerity measures demanded after the 2008 financial crash.

The scale of the criminal activity that has been exposed at News of the World demands a full and public accounting. All of the major figures associated with News International, including Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch himself, must be questioned under oath as part of a full-scale criminal investigation. In any such inquiry, they should be joined by Blair, Brown, Cameron and their associates.

It is clear, however, that the British ruling class will not carry out such an investigation. Any inquiry under the control of the existing political establishment will be a cover-up, aiming to protect News International and its allies in the political establishment and state apparatus.

Justice will be secured, and the predatory and socially destructive activities of the media barons halted, only in connection with the development of a mass political movement of the working class that sets out to remove from power an elite which has demonstrated that it is entirely unfit to rule.

Chris Marsden is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research articles by Chris Marsden

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The Media's Endless Propaganda for War

Murdoch Has Blood on His Hands

by David Swanson article link article link article link

July 14, 2011 | Global Research | War Is A Crime | OpEdNews

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Rupert Murdoch Media Empire: A Journalistic Travesty

by Karl Grossman article link article link

July 13, 2011 | CommonDreams | OpEdNews

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Murdoch & News Corps -- The cancer eating the heart out of our democracy

by Ted Newcomen article link

July 14, 2011 | OpEdNews

Rupert Murdoch: Anthony Blair’s bagman

Britain’s politicians find courage – perhaps

by Christopher King article ink article link

July 13, 2011 | Redress | ICH

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Robert Scheer: The GOP's Sick Priorities

2011-07-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

Social Security is a particularly weird whipping boy for what ails us, since the program has been solvent since its inception and will be so for the next quarter of a century.

The GOP's Sick Priorities

by Robert Scheer article link article link

July 13, 2011 | CommonDreams | TruthDig

How deceptive for politicians to stress “entitlements” when they talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs long paid for by their beneficiaries. The Republicans make it sound as if they’re doing us a favor, cutting government waste by seeking to strangle America’s two most successful domestic programs. And now Barack Obama seems poised to join their camp in undermining the essential lifeline for most of the nation’s seniors, many of whom lost their retirement savings in the banking meltdown.

These threatened programs are not government handouts to a privileged class, like defense contractors and bailed-out bankers, who do feel eminently entitled to pig out at the federal trough. On the contrary, Social Security and Medicare have been funded by a regressive tax that falls disproportionately on working middle-class income earners, while caps in the system leave the wealthy—most notably the hedge fund hustlers who helped cause today’s economic crisis—largely untaxed.

While there are many plausible ways to ensure the future of Medicare and Social Security—and extending a fair share of the burden to wealthier individuals is a good place to start—such changes should not be considered in the context of a bargain to raise the debt ceiling. These programs have nothing at all to do with a national debt that has spiraled out of control in the past four years as a result of untethered corporate greed. In that time the debt—already inflamed by two wars fought on the credit card while President George W. Bush cut taxes for the wealthy—rose a whopping 50 percent as a consequence of the deepest recession in 70 years, brought on by the banking collapse.

Indeed, the economic turmoil has put considerable pressure on these programs. In the past two years, expenditures for Social Security exceeded non-interest income for the first time since 1983, as the trustees of the fund reported the deficits “are in large part due to the weakened economy. …” The interest earned on the more than $2.4 trillion in the Social Security trust fund held by the Treasury more than made up the shortfall, and the fund will be able to fulfill its projected obligations, even given the strain of the baby boomers’ retirement, until 2036.

Social Security is a particularly weird whipping boy for what ails us, since the program has been solvent since its inception and will be so for the next quarter of a century. Is there any other public or corporate entity that we can guarantee will be in as good shape for the next 25 years, and even at that point be able to pay 75 percent of its obligations? Presidents both Republican and Democrat have routinely dipped into the Social Security trust fund to float the national debt, and yet critics from both parties have the effrontery now to treat as some sort of indulgence a program for which seniors, current and future, have paid. Seniors are as much “entitled” to the payback on their investment as the folks who buy Treasury notes, people who will be at the forefront of those protected by a rise in the debt ceiling.

Yes, there are more pressing issues with Medicare. Those have to do with cost containment in the medical industry, a situation aggravated when the Republican Bush expanded prescription drug coverage. Unfortunately, health care cost containment was not a serious focus of Obama’s health care reform, and without a national policy alternative it is difficult to contain the cost for seniors who are medically the most needy and therefore the most vulnerable.

As with the problems of Social Security, the problems of Medicare can be dealt with handily by increasing payments from the wealthier segment of the population. A very limited effort in that direction was included in the Obama health care law, which requires a 0.9 percent increase in Medicare payments beginning in 2013 for couples earning more than $250,000.

Even more troubling than potential Medicare cuts is the threat to Medicaid, a program that provides health care to 68 million needy children, disabled individuals, pregnant women and poor seniors. These people are “entitled” to such aid only as a matter of government-recognized decency that has historically been supported by both Republican and Democratic presidents. That Obama is now even considering reducing support for the most vulnerable in the current harsh economy has brought written opposition from two-thirds of Senate Democrats.

It is absurd that Medicaid, along with Medicare and Social Security, is on the chopping block when there is no serious effort to find savings in a defense budget equal to that of the rest of the world’s nations combined, and still at Cold War era levels despite the lack of a sophisticated military enemy. And that the GOP-led House has gotten a supposedly progressive president to consider doing serious damage to our most vulnerable population in order to placate Republicans determined to continue massive tax breaks for the wealthy is morally obscene.

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

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The Faces of Those Obama is Betraying

by Pat LaMarche article link article link

July 13, 2011 | CommonDreams | The Bangor Daily News (Maine)

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Stealing from Social Security Is NOT a Debt Solution -- Why Do the Media Promote This Dangerous Myth?

by Dean Baker article link article link

July 11, 2011 | AlterNet | The Guardian

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Disintegrating Economic Recovery

by Prof. John Kozy article link

July 12, 2011 | Global Research

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Europe and America: "Financially Burning"

by Bob Chapman article link

July 13, 2011 | Global Research | International Forecaster

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Great Depression Comes Knocking

by Staff Report article link

July 13, 2011 | The Daily Bell

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Dave Lefcourt: Extremism, Endless War, Apathy and Passive Indifference

2011-07-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

Extremism, Endless War, Apathy and Passive Indifference

by Dave Lefcourt article link

July 11, 2011 | OpEdNews

There are times the disenchantment feels overwhelming, that the forces of unnecessary endless war, brutality, the killing of innocents in drone strikes and missile attacks et al is so endemic while the majority of people remain apathetic and passively indifferent. That is galling.

One imagines somehow shaking people out of their stupor while shouting, "Don't you see; don't you realize what's going on?" Then coming to ones senses and thinking they're thinking I'm some sort of crazed lunatic, over-reacting as "chicken little" and the sky is falling. And this is not just with those on the right!

There are times the exasperation is felt with those on the left. Such is the case with Libya and Qaddafi. It seemed unconscionable to let this madman massacre the people of Benghazi and from here the U.N. at the 11th hour stepping in and halting his assault on the city and its people was the correct action to take. Yet the anti-war left denounced the U.N. interdiction as just another example of imperial over-reach. From here this action shouldn't be equivocated with America's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the over-reach into Pakistan and Yemen. It seemed like a knee jerk reaction.

The same can be said of the ACLU and its support of the Supreme Court's decision upholding "Citizens United" in an extremist interpretation of the 1st Amendment giving corporations the same freedom of speech rights as people.

These are two examples of leftist extremism even if they refuse to see it. One embracing the power of the state while the other seeing no legitimacy in states taking action.

The right and today's Republicans are easily dismissed as monolithic, ideological reactionaries who offer absolutely nothing. The fact is the left has its demagogues and extremist ideologues as well.

It has been hard to reconcile the ideological left's sometime lockstep, knee jerk nature.

In looking at the past there have been extremist (seen as such at the time) ideological and successful movements. Think of the suffragettes who campaigned tirelessly for women's right to vote, the civil rights movement against official segregation and denial of equal rights. Before that were the abolitionists against slavery (a cause for the Civil War but which subsequently ended the practice).

Then there have been the unsuccessful ideological movements (with some continuing to this day).

Prohibition was enacted attempting to legislate morality but was repealed some 15 years later with the realization you can't legislate against and abolish sin. It only magnified the desire to commit it and made it even more appealing. It is why the war on drugs is an utter failure. Even poverty which has always existed can never be eliminated and the war on poverty could do little in ending it. The war on terror only results in endless war and is something that has always existed and can never be eradicated. Like crime can never be completely eradicated it can be controlled from completely eroding civil society but there will always be crime.

Declaring war on something doesn't mean it will be eradicated. Some cures can be found for some diseases but disease will never be eliminated.

Can we make war against brutality and eliminate it from the face of the earth? Unfortunately, no.

Even when there has been successful war against an imperialist fascist state such as Nazi Germany in W.W. II, its success didn't eliminate imperialism or fascism forever. Fascist imperialism could be resurrected. Certainly ending Nazi fascism didn't kill fascism.

Communism didn't end with the demise of the Soviet Union. Capitalism doesn't exist without the state rescuing it from its excesses and applying socialistic measures to keep it from imploding.

Man is an imperfect species. He (she) can never be made perfect. Life itself can never be made perfect, with only success and no failure. There can not be success without some failure.

We are on the threshold of biological wonder, completing the genome and working with the fundamental building blocks of life. There may be a time where new limbs can be grown, a cure for Alzheimer's and the like but the idea of endless life and no death? Prolonging life is obviously happening now, but death is as much a part of life as life itself.

In the West we embrace "progress" as if it is a human, instinctive and universal value. This is Western hubris as much as American's hubris believing everyone wants be an American or that globalization is some inevitable result of human progress.

There are Islamic cultures that do not embrace "progress", where religion and government are the same and not separate as we in the west believe it should be.

The American Indian culture had no concept of ownership of the land. Owning land was an alien concept brought by European colonialism and imperialism. Americans often think of "ownership" as something God given and a natural right.

The American Indian culture was decimated by overwhelming numbers of mostly white Americans of European heritage taking "ownership" of the land. Just imagine if the American Indian culture had superior numbers"but it didn't and the Native Americans were brutalized and forced to adapt. So in truth the freedom we extol was really the result of conquest and plunder, not something that God granted.

Be that as it may, too many Americans today take their freedom for granted, as if they are "entitled" and as Americans "exceptional" in getting their way, again as if God granted.

This American hubris is triumphalist that embraces unnecessary war and acquiesces over our hegemony all over the world and to which the world opposes.

Hopefully, it is not too late to learn mutual respect of others, their values, their culture and differences.

We can no longer be imperialist overseers as if the oceans are American lakes and we dominate the world.

It remains to be seen whether we have the foresight and ability to do so; either that or suffer the fate of all other empires before us that fell in the past. This time in our own unceremonious demise.

Dave Lefcourt (dglefc22733@aol.com): Retired. The author of "DECEIT AND EXCESS IN AMERICA, HOW THE MONEYED INTERESTS HAVE STOLEN AMERICA AND HOW WE CAN GET IT BACK", Authorhouse, 2009

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Ethan Indi: Jesus, My Favorite Conspiracy Theorist

2011-07-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Jesus, My Favorite Conspiracy Theorist

by Ethan Indi article link

July 11, 2011 | OpEdNews

Language is like a map. And stories take people to new places. Yet if we don't possess the language to put the story in context its value might be overlooked. Elimination of language takes away and new language expands. Conspiracy theorists often offer new language so people can follow them, while people who would like to eliminate conspiracies like to eliminate language and stories and storytellers even.

President Eisenhower arguably knew more about the military and war than any other US president and was perhaps the greatest conspiracy theorist of the last century with his coining of the phrase "military industrial complex' and his warning concerning it. The powers that be normally discount and disbelieve any notion of conspiracy, and any new language concerning it, but when the President defines it, it is hard to deny. The military industrial complex describes a militaristic corporate entity among entities.

There is endless variety of conspiracy, clandestine crimes and power grabs, but they all pertain to one goal; oligarchical collectivism. George Orwell, another great conspiracy theorist right up there with Eisenhower, originally penned this phrase. He arguably authored the most profound political fiction on conspiracy theory. Oligarchical collectivism is at root of every institutional conspiracy over individuals for thousands of years. Oligarchical collectivism means the coming together of the few in control of the many, the linking of pyramid systems. The military industrial complex is just one example of oligarchical collectivism.

Oligarchical collectivism is the phrase, the unification of institutions of the few in control of the many is the story. The military industrial complex and oligarchical collectivism are keys to understanding the map, the story. Jesus Christ's story is one of an individual standing up to oligarchical collectivism. He is a peaceful warrior who sees wrongdoing interlinked over individuals and speaks up about it. Jesus reacted to the epitome of oligarchical collectivism and tossed over tables and ruffled the feathers of institutions. He stood up the interlinked institutions of the Jewish temple supported by the Roman State and the traders/bankers inside the temple. The oligarchical collectivism for Jesus was the same we have today, interlinking of institutions of religion, state and corporation. The wrongdoing set forth by linking of church, state and corporate institutions is enough to make even Jesus angry.

Exploitive institutions are set up in the same pyramidal shape now as they were then. The few are at the top controlling the many through interlocked institutions. And people should be angry. People should be angry and inspired to take action, like a peaceful warrior, like Jesus, when oligarchcical collectivism takes place.

And yet people are so subdued, so absolutely and wholly apathetic that we will let the military industrial complex run over strangers and their oligarchical operations rain nuclear poison over entirety. We will let corporate agriculture genetically modify plants and animals without concern. Jesus' story is the story the Prince of Peace fearlessly standing up to and calling out the oligarchical collectivism of his day. Jesus stood up to the oligarchical collectivism he was surrounded by not because he was the son of God, but because he was also a mortal and standing up for liberty is at the core of our mortal human condition. Jesus wanted them to stop doing business and exchanging money in the temple which made revenue for the few among the many, those in control of the church, state and corporate.

It is human nature to stand up and repel oligarchical collectivism and yet people today are so passive and tolerant we will let oligarchical collectivists hold reign through one overt conspiracy after another. This itself is conspiracy and as a accused conspiracy theorist I have the phrase for the map to the story. There is an ongoing conspiracy committed by all institutions to instill tolerance on people. Being tolerant toward individuals is okay. Compassion towards individuals is better. Tolerance of individuals is a start, but even Jesus Christ the lord didn't tolerate institutional wrongdoing. Jesus knew very well the difference between individuals and institutions.

People are tolerant of wrongdoing, tolerant of oligarchical institutions, tolerant of militaristic corporatist exploitation of others, people are tolerant of government involvement in drug smuggling and gun running. Many people are tolerant little bitches who take more offense to harsh language than they do to exploitation of their neighbors and themselves. And at the same time those with institutionally induced tolerance of institutional wrongdoing are less likely to tolerate an individual's alternate race, origin or perspective.

This misunderstanding, this misunderstanding of tolerance and confusion of individuals and institutions is a conspiracy gluing all other conspiracies together. It is the conspiracy of Institutionally Induced Tolerance and should be a psychiatric disorder simply called IT. You have to be fearful of being human, you have to lose all sense of humanity to stand down to institutions and oligarchical collectivism. You have to be barren of feeling or ignorant of the most basic precepts of reality to not be angry when confronted by oligarchical collectivism. Perhaps the conspiracy of IT is so wide that tolerance is induced biologically as well as politically.

I myself am certain that the conspiracy theory of IT is not theory, but certainty. I feel this way through compiled information and something institutions do not have and would like to eliminate the validity of, intuition. Institutions despise human intuition, mainly because intuition can detect oligarchical collectivism instantly. To me IT is not as much theory as it is actuality, however I understand it as a theory and in using the word theory I like all other theorists of all other subjects, merely pose the notion for consideration. Eighty five percent of Americans suffer from Institution Induced Tolerance, do your part to fight this disease and stand up to oligarchical collectivism, like Jesus.

Ethan Indi: I write. I love the USA; locals, land and liberty. I hate institutions placed above locals, land and liberty. I have roots in Maine, NYC and Northern California. My freshman work is titled The Complete Patriot's Guide to Oligarchical Collectivism: Its Theory and Practice. It is pro individual and anti institution and may become contraband for thought provoking. In the book I investigate political mentality and political power for individuals among institutions. Progressive Press is the publisher. Within the book are new concepts and new terms based on observations of history, philosophy and reality. I coin the term petrolithic era which began when Diesel died and continues on today. You can see cover and buy it before it's banned on amazon or many other websites and perhaps your local independent bookstore.

OpEdNews articles by Ethan Indi

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The Prophetic Redoubt and Prescience of Theodore Roszak

by Christopher Diamant article link

July 11, 2011 | OpEdNews

Shamus Cooke: Deficit Reduction vs. Democracy

2011-07-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

Deficit Reduction vs. Democracy

by Shamus Cooke article link

July 11, 2011 | CommonDreams

Listening to Congress debate deficit deduction is like listening to a den of lions discuss the welfare of zebras. In both cases the debate is very one-sided. Democrats and Republicans sound disagreeable on TV, but their arguments differ by the tiniest of degrees (like lions fighting over how best to eat a zebra.)

The zebras in this case are U.S. working people, who are not seeing their interests represented by their so-called representatives. Instead of fixing the national deficit in the way that the vast majority of Americans would like, only the opinions of a tiny minority of very rich people are being considered. Both political parties are uniting to reduce the deficits on the backs of working people.

For example, Obama's chief of staff, William Daley, spoke recently about the budget deficit and the need for massive cuts to social programs, which include Social Security and Medicare:

“Everyone [Democrats and Republicans] agrees that a number around $4 trillion [in cuts] is the number that will make a serious dent in our deficit...He [Obama] didn’t come to this town to do little things. He came to do big things.” (July 10th, 2011).

In a recent presidential address Obama said: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

This is the language of the right wing, which is now the language of both the Democrat and Republican parties. In reality, the U.S. government could easily access trillions of dollars in revenue; it simply chooses not to. Both political parties refuse to discuss how raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations could easily fix the current deficit issue on both the federal and state levels. The ONLY mention of taxing the rich is in the context of the Bush tax cuts, which some Democrats would allow to expire in the coming year; but it’s very possible that Democrats will "compromise" on this issue yet again.

Even economist and liberal Obama-backer Paul Krugman put two and two together when he said:

"in fact, if all you did was listen to his [Obama's] speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the GOP’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it." (July 8th, 2011).

The rich and corporations have always hated Social Security and Medicare; they'd rather not pay taxes towards these programs at all. It lowers their profits. And ONLY this perspective is being shared on the mainstream media and being discussed in the halls of Congress. If massive cuts are made to these federal programs at the expense of millions of working people -- without substantially raising taxes on the wealthy -- then the safety net in the U.S. will have been critically injured.

How would the vast majority of working people in this country like the deficit to be fixed? Poll after poll has indicated that cutting Social Security and Medicare is VERY unpopular, while raising taxes on the wealthy is extremely popular. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that 78 percent of Americans are opposed to cuts in Medicare, while 72 percent favor taxing the rich. (April 20th, 2011).

But polls are just one way of expressing popular opinion, i.e. democracy. Another alternative is massive street mobilizations. In Greece the majority of people have exposed the anti-democratic policies of their government, which is trying to impose massive cuts to social programs to fix Greece's budget problems. Sound familiar? If the Greek government doesn't change course it will have zero popular backing, i.e., it will be a dictatorship. Obama's silence on this situation in Greece is very telling.

In order to follow the Greek and Wisconsin examples of massive mobilizations, there must be an organizational push within working class organizations to make it happen. A resolution adopted unanimously by the Executive Committee of San Francisco Labor Council on July 5, 2011 expresses this vision:

"The big question now is what the labor movement will do to meet this challenge confronting working people and the great majority. The choice is clear: either confine labor's protest against cuts in the social programs to pronouncements opposing them, coupled with lobbying; or combine these efforts with an all-out mobilization of the rank-and-file and our allies to prevent the cuts from being enacted."

The San Francisco Labor Council resolution also encouraged all sectors of labor to organize "a campaign to mobilize support for "No Cuts or Concessions! Tax the Corporations and the Rich!" in the streets -- where it counts the most -- and in every corner of the nation."

Democracy is no longer expressed in the halls of Congress nor in the White House and must therefore be transferred to the streets.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscook@gmail.com

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Guess Who Didn't Benefit from $2 Trillion Worth of Increased Worker Productivity

Nearly $2 Trillion Purloined from U.S. Workers in 2009

by James Cypher article link article link

July 11, 2011 | CommonDreams | Dollars & Sense

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The Great Unravelling

by Stephen Lendman article link

July 10, 2011 | Countercurrents

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Trickle-Down Cruelty and the Politics of Austerity

by Henry A. Giroux article link

July 11, 2011 | Truthout

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Joseph E. Stiglitz: The Evils of Unregulated Capitalism

2011-07-11T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Evils of Unregulated Capitalism

by Joseph E. Stiglitz article link article link article link

July 10, 2011 | CommonDreams | Al Jazeera | ICH

Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology - the belief in free and unfettered markets - brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980s until 2007, US-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world.

Indeed, over the course of this ideology's 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.

I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government.

Alas, that has not been the case.

On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy - or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.

In the US, this right-wing resurgence, whose adherents evidently seek to repeal the basic laws of mathematics and economics, is threatening to force a default on the national debt. If Congress mandates expenditures that exceed revenues, there will be a deficit, and that deficit has to be financed.

Rather than carefully balancing the benefits of each government expenditure program with the costs of raising taxes to finance those benefits, the right seeks to use a sledgehammer - not allowing the national debt to increase forces expenditures to be limited to taxes.

This leaves open the question of which expenditures get priority - and if expenditures to pay interest on the national debt do not, a default is inevitable. Moreover, to cut back expenditures now, in the midst of an ongoing crisis brought on by free-market ideology, would inevitably simply prolong the downturn.

A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the US faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt.

So what happened?

Unaffordable tax cuts and wars, a major recession, and soaring health-care costs - fueled in part by the commitment of George W Bush's administration to giving drug companies free rein in setting prices, even with government money at stake - quickly transformed a huge surplus into record peacetime deficits.

The remedies to the US deficit follow immediately from this diagnosis: put America back to work by stimulating the economy; end the mindless wars; rein in military and drug costs; and raise taxes, at least on the very rich.

But the right will have none of this, and instead is pushing for even more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, together with expenditure cuts in investments and social protection that put the future of the US economy in peril and that shred what remains of the social contract.

Meanwhile, the US financial sector has been lobbying hard to free itself of regulations, so that it can return to its previous, disastrously carefree, ways.

But matters are little better in Europe. As Greece and others face crises, the medicine du jour is simply timeworn austerity packages and privatization, which will merely leave the countries that embrace them poorer and more vulnerable. This medicine failed in East Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, and it will fail in Europe this time around, too. Indeed, it has already failed in Ireland, Latvia, and Greece.

There is an alternative: an economic-growth strategy supported by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Growth would restore confidence that Greece could repay its debts, causing interest rates to fall and leaving more fiscal room for further growth-enhancing investments.

Growth itself increases tax revenues and reduces the need for social expenditures, such as unemployment benefits. And the confidence that this engenders leads to still further growth.

Regrettably, the financial markets and right-wing economists have gotten the problem exactly backwards: they believe that austerity produces confidence, and that confidence will produce growth. But austerity undermines growth, worsening the government's fiscal position, or at least yielding less improvement than austerity's advocates promise. On both counts, confidence is undermined, and a downward spiral is set in motion.

Do we really need another costly experiment with ideas that have failed repeatedly? We shouldn't, but increasingly it appears that we will have to endure another one nonetheless.

A failure of either Europe or the US to return to robust growth would be bad for the global economy. A failure in both would be disastrous - even if the major emerging-market countries have attained self-sustaining growth.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University. Among many books, he is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for research on the economics of information. He is the co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict. His most recent book is Free Fall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

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Reagan Mythology is Leading US Off a Cliff

During Reagan's presidency, the US went from a creditor to debtor nation and marked a take-off for financial inequality.

by Paul Rosenberg article link article link

July 10, 2011 | CommonDreams | Al Jazeera

Caroline Arnold: How Much Blame Do We Share for Our Leaders' Failures?

2011-07-10T09:21:00.000-07:00

How Much Blame Do We Share for Our Leaders' Failures?

Are we rats or are we humans?

by Caroline Arnold article link

July 10, 2011 | CommonDreams | Kent-Ravenna Record Courier (Ohio)

Six years ago, in the wake of the botched management of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, a friend warned me against blaming Republicans.

I replied flippantly that as an unrepentant progressive, I quite enjoyed blaming Republicans, though I recognized that even the GOP, PNAC, and all their associated think-tanks and trained media rescue-dogs couldn’t have single-handedly created a disaster of that magnitude. I added that if the Republicans had planned Katrina, they probably would have directed it to Ohio. Of course there aren’t any hurricanes in Ohio, but heck, there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq, either.

Another friend who had volunteered in the cleanup of Katrina running a ham radio operation observed that among the agencies and organizations trying to help, the farther up the hierarchy of any institution, public or private, the worse prepared the people were, the more out of touch, the more incompetent, and the more their efforts were downright damaging.

... sounds like The Peter Principle to me. And an interesting corollary would probably be that the higher the hierarchy, the greater the level of incompetence.

But how does that work in democracy? Should we expect our elected leaders to rise to our level of incompetence, or theirs? And then who should we blame for their failure?

Or have they failed?

Take Obama. He claimed to offer "the Audacity of Hope", and too many of us interpreted that as a Hope of Audacity. We hoped Obama would be audacious, bold and daring, and stand up against war, torture, extralegal assassinations, proliferating weaponry and tyranny, and privatization of public responsibilities, and for human rights, due process, universal health care, quality education for all, and policies for safe renewable energy, sustainable agriculture and humane immigration.

Though Democrats feel he’s failed, he’s been quite competent at managing the takeover of our government by the private sector, corporations and the very wealthy.

Looking at the field of possible Republican candidates doesn’t offer much hope either, though there is plenty of audacity – and citizens who apparently resonate with it.

Four years ago I wrote a piece based on the Declaration of Independence that included these paragraphs:

The Bush-Cheney White House has enlisted "Armies of foreign Mercenaries" (in this case multinational corporations) to do the works of death, desolation, and tyranny. These bright angels manipulate public policy and public funds: Big Arms - corporations that profit from making deadly weapons and materials for war; Big Energy - profiting from fossil resources, nuclear technology, and human poverty and overpopulation; and Big Brokers - of services ranging from student loans and health care to mercenary soldiers, "extreme rendition,"commercial spying, and propaganda for governments, businesses and ideologies.

It is increasingly evident that Bush and Cheney believe they Command & Control the U.S. government, its people and its resources, that they need not obey its laws, or even let citizens know what they do with our money, our government, our young soldiers and our venerable ideals.

What’s changed except the names of those in power?

Today our elected leaders committed to privatization, predatory capitalism and Command & Control management are prevailing, making us non-rich people into lab-rats and feeder-rats for their experiments. Cutting our rations of locally grown food, affordable homes, education, medical care, clean air and water, and feeding our youth and our planet’s resources to war, weapons and private profit will not lead to justice, jobs, prosperity or democracy. It will only reduce more of us to rats to serving the recreations of the rich.

The problem with ideal democracy – the commitment to give every person the right to participate in decisions that affect their lives – is that it is not quick or nimble enough to deal with its own complexities, with the language, metaphors and concepts of media-driven popular culture, or with the light-speed communication of information, misinformation, and disinformation, let alone those engendered by overpopulation, predatory capitalism, runaway consumption, mass media, politics, religions, and advances in science, technology and medicine. It is further challenged by the extension of personhood to corporations.

* * *

Fifty years ago Reinhold Niebuhr observed:

"The sickness from which modern civilization suffers is organic and constitutional. ... Private ownership means social power. The unequal division of social power leads automatically inequality and injustice."

Any kind of power – physical violence, slavery, racism, sexism, bullying; political, theological, or economic, corrupts both those who wield it and those who receive it.

Today’s efforts to destroy unions and collective bargaining in Ohio and Wisconsin, and to promote our assorted overseas wars are essentially aimed at stripping self-determination from – thereby enslaving-- those unable to pay for it.

Are we rats or are we humans – aware, discerning, self-determined and capable of choosing our leaders, actions and words? Eight years ago I had the audacity to be hopeful ("Let's Talk..." 5/18/03 ) that we could talk to one another.

Apparently we’ve reached the level of our incompetence. Now who can we blame?

Caroline Arnold ($20,000/ $70,000) retired after 12 years on the Washington staff of US Senator John Glenn. She served three terms on the Kent (OH) Board of Education. In retirement she is active with Kent Environmental Council and sits on the board Family & Community Services of Portage County. E-mail: csarnold@neo.rr.com

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Metaphors for a Post-Federal America

by Karen Kwiatkowski article link

July 9, 2011 | LewRockwell

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Bob Chapman: The Looting of Federal Pensions, Social Security and Medicare

2011-07-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

Mounting Public Debt. The Looting of Federal Pensions, Social Security and Medicare

by Bob Chapman article link

July 9, 2011 | Global Research

Government debt will be in the vicinity of $1.5 trillion this year. Ever since May 16th short-term debt has been frozen at about $14.3 trillion. Up until May 16th the year-to-debt fiscal debt was $783.135 billion. That means if no August 2nd agreement is reach, $275 billion will be needed up to August 2nd, a total of about $700 billion will be needed by 9/30/11, the end of the fiscal year. Those funds are to come from federal pensions, Social Security and Medicare. How will these funds be paid back? We do not know, but we would guess there could be legislation to commandeer private pensions, 401Ks and IRAs. On the other hand an alternative is for the Fed to create $700 billion and buy the Treasury debt. That alone, with normal funding, could reach over $2 trillion. That means they would have to create another additional $850 billion to keep the economy from slipping into a great dark pit. That means additional net funds that would have to be created out of thin air of close to $3 trillion. That means mega inflation 2 to 3 years down the line. In addition the US debt to GDP should be more than 100% by the end of the fiscal year 9/30/11.

We guess the Fed can keep interest rates near zero until borrowers finally get fed up with low returns and a loss in principal, as the dollar deteriorates. It was four years ago when rates were 5-1/4%. Rates in time will return to that level and cause economic and financial devastation. We can also assure you Treasury buyers are not driving rates down and bond prices up, the Fed can take full credit for that. Those who seek safety in low interest Treasuries are giving up purchasing power. In today’s markets there is no such thing as safety.

There are those that believe it is time to start to raise interest rates and that the time for stimulus is past. They are probably correct, but the problem is the economy cannot stand on its own. Although deflationary depression will come eventually to force it now would mean a great war or series of wars would now have to begin.

It also has become self-evident to the populace or at least half of Americans that we cannot keep amassing debt and boosting the economy with stimulus. Their fears are reflected via much higher inflation and major unemployment, both of which are worsening daily. They have experienced three years of this, so to be told by the President, the Fed, the Treasury and Wall Street that what they are experiencing is transitory, reaches deaf ears.

Another grandstanding act by the President and his handlers was the latest release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve - only enough to replace one days worldwide consumption. This was supposed to show the administration’s concern that Americans were paying too much for gasoline and inflation was cutting their purchasing power. Their attempt was a failure, but the sale brought in badly needed cash to fund the growing deficit. We believe that was really what the exercise was all about. The move also had its negative affects on the commodity and gold and silver markets, at least for a few days. The failure of these financial and economic false flag operations shows you the underlying weakness of the financial and economic structure and the strength of commodities and gold and silver. Every move Wall Street and banking makes lasts only days or a week, then it is right back to the forceful underlying trend. We believe these elitists are now starting to question whether what they are doing will work. An example was the massive naked short covering not seen in years in gold and silver. JPM, HSBC and others lost the battle in silver and capitulated by covering. This was a major event. They knew the RICO class action lawsuit against them was about to be announced, so they covered a good portion of their shorts that were being used to suppress silver prices. Gold reacted by rising almost $35.00 and closing up $32.60 and silver rising $2.25 and closing up $1.80. The professionals know what this means. The cartel has suffered a huge defeat and if JPM and HSBC lose in court, which they should, it will cost the elitists tens of billions of dollars. The question is how will they arrange to transfer the losses to the public, or will the losses be big enough to take JPM and HSBC under. Only time will tell, but the result will be less control over gold and silver markets and a slight move back to free markets. They cannot take too many losses like this. What it shows you is that these people can be beaten and that we will win this war against these criminals.

Over the past few years, lenders have cut back on lines of credit, which has made many Americans unable to access affordable credit. The engine that has driven the economy for many years, cheap available credit, has come to an end and accessibility will become more difficult in the future. A few years ago we noted the availability of credit was beginning to be reduced and in time would reduce consumption. Over those ensuing years many Americans are no longer in the credit system because they cannot meet lending or regulatory qualifications. This is a direct reflection of 22.6% unemployment and massive home foreclosures. The unemployment numbers are even worse than meet the eye. The statistics define the private sector too broadly. In May, the distortion continued with private businesses adding 83,000 jobs of which 34,000 were in health care, social services and education, which are all subsidized. Thus, the real addition was 49,000. Over the past two years 980,000 jobs were added, 7.7 million jobs lost and of 8.4 million jobs lost so far in the inflationary depression only 291,000 have been added. If you cover 11 years instead of five years, 11.7 million have been lost. Real private sector employment was 83.1%. In 12/09 the number was 83.8% and in 1950, 86.2% or a 3.6% drop.

The government needs to revive domestic manufacturing, because foreign nations deliberately devalue their currencies and pay slaves wages. The only thing that can change this is tariffs on goods and services. Thus, tightened lending standards and horrible unemployment keep homebuyers from buying into that monstrous inventory for sale. Never mind buy buying a house, those unemployed cannot open a bank account nor do they own a debit or credit card. Credit scores may have risen to 696, the highest in at least four years, but it doesn’t help the unemployed. The other underlying cause is that consumers simply have too much debt, even though delinquencies have fallen 30% in two years. Those with jobs are doing ok, but persistently higher inflation is eating big chunks of their power to consume.

What America is seeing today is a flat lining economy. When the credit crisis began, and it is not over, real GDP fell 4%, vs. 25% in the early 1930s. Can you imagine where the economy would be without the bailout of the financial sector, government and to a lesser degree the economy? We are talking about perhaps $5 trillion that we know about. If you take away unemployment, extended unemployment, food stamps, Medicaid and various other social services, we could be in the same spot today as we were in the 1930s. We have been without recovery for almost five years. At least the Great Depression had recovery in 1933 and 1934. We may not have a WWII on the horizon, but we sure have many perpetual wars for perpetual peace. Today the excuse is rogue states and terrorists, which are just excuses to have more undeclared wars.

We have to laugh at noted economists who continue to bleat about unemployment in the 1930s that was 25% and today it is only 9.1%. In the 1930s U3 was 25.2% and U6 was 37.6%. Today U3 is 9.1%, U6 is 16.3% and if you extract the birth/death ratio it is 22.6%. There were two recoveries in the 1930s, but both aborted. Over the past few years we have seen transitory gains and actually very little result for some $4.3 trillion in spending. Even so-called conservative economists use government-generated statistics, which they know are bogus. How can they hope to come up with the correct answers for future economic and financial problems? In addition most do not get involved in geopolitics, which severely hampers prospectives and projections. Along those lines those who wish for lower commodity prices are engaging in wishful thinking. Not only do we see fire, draught and floods, but we also see geopolitical dislocation and a flight from stock and bond markets to the safety of commodities, gold and silver. That is not going to end anytime soon.

Economists still see recovery without tariffs, recovery, which always eludes them. For several years workers have worked to a maximum of their ability and they still can compete with the emerging world, due to almost zero interest rates. Employers when confronted with a choice of hiring more employees choose to move the work to offshore locations. Attitudes such as this seal the fate of working Americans.

As you can see corporate America has lost its direction. They have become creatures of internationalism, participating in the extinction of the US and its world reserve currency, the dollar. The culture in corporate America is decidedly corruption augmented by government’s drive to implement corporate fascism very reminiscent of Germany and Italy in the 1930s, which was a trial run for today’s government.

The world’s problem is debt – too much of it. Corporate America, particularly Wall Street, thinks debt creation can go on indefinitely as they continue to loot America. The US economy is doing a slow motion swan dive and the corporatists do not care because they believe they’ll become part of this new World Order. What they do not understand is they are stuck in neutral, as they proceed with their looting operations. Worse yet all, or almost alll of the gold belonging to America citizens is gone. The US dollar is like so many other fiat currencies. People often ask, what currency should be in and the simple answer is none, except to function from month-to-month. The record is there one for all to see, all currencies have on average lost value versus gold and silver for 11 straight years. What more can be expected as deficits for all countries mount year after year? This is why almost all governments are trapped. They have to continue to create money and credit or their economies will collapse. The problems are still all there. Greece and the other five lame ducks, the euro and the EU. The European banking system is still staring over the abyss. We have no debt extension. 4% of the SPR has been sold with no net effect on the oil price or availability. To refill the salt domes will be very costly, while in the meantime government has more money to waste. While all this transpires the military industrial complex is laughing all the way to the bank.

The result is investors continue to flee to gold and silver albeit in small numbers. All gold and silver investments only aggregate 0.8% of Americans. What will prices be when 15% of Americans become involved, as that number did in 1980? The success of gold and silver are just a direct reflection of monetary profligacy and the debasement of the US dollar. For the past 2-1/2 years gold has taken over as the only real currency and the dollar can only regain status by again backing the currency with gold. After the recent criminal correction in gold, silver and commodities in just three days, as we predicted the losses have been regained. The suppression cartel is losing its power and soon will become a nonentity. Very soon all will see new highs.

The big question is why hasn’t government and the Fed tried to solve the economic situation? The answer is they have no intention of doing so, because they want the public on their knees economically and financially so they can impose World Government. We have news for them, this time they are going to lose and lose it all. Yes, there is going to be a great war or a series of wars you won’t escape that. These criminals are not going down without a fight and it will be a very nasty struggle.

The banker situation in Greece, that is the rape and looting of the country, is a set piece of what bankers intend to do in all countries.

As we enter the twilight of the American nation we have never been so overwhelmed by the servile incompetence of Congress and its entourage of bureaucrats. We call them team A and team B. As each administration changes the participants change, but their length of service lingers on for many years. They represent the same masters who control them from behind the scenes with the same mission, but with slightly different approaches in order to make it seem change is being made. A great many of these servants from academia although very bright, never had an original thought in their life, never have worked in the business world and all are disciples of John Maynard Keyes and his corporatist fascist philosophy. Is it any wonder our nation is in the state it is in?

These are the same geniuses who created massive increases of money and credit starting 11 years ago, only to cap it off with QE1 and QE2 and stimulus 1 and 2, that have only served to rescue an insolvent financial sector and a corrupt insolvent government, which is still in progress. Wall Street and banking have been treated to massive amounts of money supplied by American citizens, who have seen their life savings foreclosed on. They borrow from the Fed at almost zero percent interest rates to invest in higher yielding bets, and wild speculation in totally rigged, manipulated markets. Just to show you how Wall Street’s rigged game works a number of major firms go for months without having a losing trading day. That is impossible unless the game is rigged, which it is for certain elitist, Illuminist corporations. These profit centers are created to offset the massive losses sustained in bad loans, mortgagees and from other speculations. Banks were leveraged 70 to 1 on average. It is now 20 to 40 to one, up from a normal 9 to 1. As a result government sees only 20% of its debt offerings being bought by Americans and foreigners. The remainder is being bought by the Federal Reserve, which for the most part creates money and credit out of thin air to meet these needs.

Bob Chapman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Michael Payne: If American Exceptionalism Were a Reality

2011-07-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

If American Exceptionalism Were a Reality: Here's What Life in America Would Be Like

by Michael Payne article link

July 07, 2011 | Information Clearing House

I occasionally hear someone in the news speak of "American Exceptionalism", the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other nations; that we are unique among nations and generally superior to them in almost any measurable category. That's a nice thought but it's just not reality. That's not to say that it cannot be attained at some future time. So, let's discuss what America would be like if this nation could truly be called exceptional.

That America would resemble the one that existed after the Second World War when people felt really good about themselves. Tom Brokaw even wrote a book about Americans of that time and coined the term, the "Greatest Generation." During those times, the future was bright, and the sky was the limit; everything was looking up as the nation entered an era of what was anticipated to be an indefinite period of peace and prosperity.

That generation had the opportunity, and the potential, to lead the nation in exactly that direction and it did, for a time, but then a succession of wars and military actions interrupted those hopes and dreams. But what if America had not taken that turn in the wrong direction? Let's attempt to describe a future America as it might have been initially envisioned by those in the 1950's as they contemplated how America could evolve into an exceptional nation and society.

The America that they envisioned would be a prosperous country with a robust economy. The American dream would be in effect with lots of upward mobility for all citizens. There would be plenty of wealthy people, a vibrant, hard-working middle class and, yes, we'd have a lower income class -- but it would not be nearly as large and disadvantaged as that of today.

The distribution of wealth between the classes would be balanced, it wouldn't be a situation such as we find today in which most analyses show that the top 1% own about 35% of total wealth, the next 19% own 50% and the bottom 80% own only 15%. No, it would be much more fair and balanced than that because of a system of taxation that our government had created to make certain that every person in America, regardless of their income, paid their fair share; tax breaks, unnecessary incentives and loopholes, together with offshore tax evasion accounts, by corporations and the wealthy would have been eliminated.

There would be a thriving manufacturing sector because the Congress would have set up a system of tax incentives and penalties, plus appropriate tariffs that created millions of new jobs in America, and minimized overseas outsourcing. Corporations and workers would have reasonably good relationships, not perfect, but civil. Workers would earn good wages and CEO's would be very well paid but nothing like their salaries today which often are 700 times greater those of their workers.

Our government and the business community would have recognized that petroleum would certainly become much more scarce and expensive in the future and they would have worked together to create and develop new sources of alternate energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, and biofuels. The new industries and their energy saving products would fuel the consumer-driven economy, increase the nation's exports dramatically and, once again, make American manufacturing a force in the world.

In that America we would have a superior, well funded education system as we did in the past. Our students would be proficient in math and science, and would place very high in world academic rankings, far better than that of today where we rank 21st in math, 25th in mathematics and 15% in reading literacy among the industrialized nations. Teachers would no longer be prime targets for layoffs by Republican governors and they would restore our educational foundations.

The nation would have a universal health care system that covered every citizen from birth to death. It would be a single payer system as effective as those of all of the other industrialized nations of the world. The massive health care industry, with its monumental profits derived from constant increases in premiums, would be phased out. Americans would no longer be going bankrupt as a result of astronomical health care bills. The Congress and the president would have initiated this great change as they fully realized that health care for all Americans were a basic right.

The nation's infrastructure would rank with the best in the world, not 23rd as it does today. Our interstates, roads, highways, bridges and waterways would be well maintained. There would be far fewer over-the-road trucks on our highways and fewer automobiles. There would be efficient, affordable public transportation, greatly increased railroad traffic, high speed trains between cities and even bullet trains, say from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. We would see a significant movement to electric and hybrid cars; huge SUV's and V-8's would become totally obsolete.

Wall Street and our financial systems would be stable and growing, based upon reasonable and appropriate rules and regulations instituted by Congress to prevent abusive and manipulative practices. Many of the financial crooks and manipulators would be in prison after our Justice Department, at the president's urging, would have been investigated and prosecuted them. As a result home foreclosures and related personal bankruptcies due to illegal and manipulative mortgage practices would no longer be a problem.

Congress would be a place where the interests of the people were paramount, where Corporate America had no more influence, where one party could not block legislation or presidential appointments; there would be no such thing as a filibuster as the Congress would have overhauled the legislative rules. Presidential and congressional election campaigns would be six months long, they would be financed by public funds; corporate contributions would be illegal and all voting would be done by paper ballots with audit trails to prevent abuse.

There would still be a threat of terror in the world but America would address it by a combination of intelligence agencies, Special Forces and highly sophisticated electronic surveillance systems. Gone would be the vast military empire and its hundreds of bases. The annual defense budget would be about one third of what it had been at its peak of $1.3 trillion. America would have a real Defense Department not one that specialized in offensive military actions around the world.

There would be three political parties in America and a new breed of politicians that would have no need for monetary ties to corporations because of newly instituted campaign finance reforms; our elected representatives in Washington would be free to enact legislation in the best interests of the people. Corporate America would no longer own the Congress and call the shots. Corporations would assume their proper place as a driving force in the new economy.

And last and best of all there would be an American president with courage and strong moral beliefs that could not be cowed by the military or beholden to Corporate America and lobbyist organizations; a new breed of president who understood that war was a last resort, not to be launched by pre-emptive strikes and invasions of sovereign nations. This would be a president who put the interests of the American people above all, listened to their views and responded to their needs and problems.

We need to contrast the America that I'm portraying here with the America of today. Quite a bit different, aren't they? Many might say that the exceptional America I'm describing is a totally unrealistic supposition at best, that it sounds like some kind of Utopian society in which everything would be perfection. No, what I'm describing is not perfection; it is simply how a stable, responsible society would be expected to function if its government had put its priorities in the proper order, with the needs and interests of the American people at the top of the list.

I'm describing the America that might have been.

Michael Payne is an independent progressive who writes articles about domestic social and political matters as well as American foreign policy. He is a U.S. Army veteran.

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Szandor Blestman: War, the Sickness of Empire and Economic Genocide

2011-07-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

War, the Sickness of Empire and Economic Genocide

by Szandor Blestman article link article link

July 04, 2011 | Silver Bear Cafe | Szandor Blestman

I've made the claim for some time now that the economy is people. It's you and me trading goods and services on a voluntary basis. It's me providing you with my labor or something I've created, then you providing him with your labor or something you've created, then him providing her with his labor or something he's created and so on and so forth. This is what makes economy, so it would make sense that the economy would grow as the population grows. It would make sense that the economy would shrink as the population shrinks. It would make sense that the economy would stabilize when the population stabilizes. But this is not what has happened. I believe this is at least partially because some people have been able to manipulate the mechanisms of economy in unnatural ways for their own benefit, and therefore to the detriment of most others.

One way this can be accomplished is through war. It has been said that war is the health of the state. Certainly it has been shown through history that nothing grows the power of a central government better than war. But while war may help the machinations of the state, it does not do the same for the economy. Instead, it takes resources that would be better spent on other ventures and uses them to destroy lives and property. Yes, it might help enrich certain individuals and corporations and those who work for them, but in the end it is a drain on resources and kills the very people who could help grow the economy through peaceful, mutually beneficial trade.

This might be something that many Americans in particular might find hard to accept. The population of that nation has not had to deal with the horrors of war upon the citizenry for almost a hundred and fifty years. The wars their government has engaged in have more or less been profitable to them. World War I helped its economy as it remained neutral and provided arms to the combatants before they entered it in 1917. World War II provided American industry with many opportunities before the Japanese attacked near the end of 1941. The industrial might of America was unrivaled coming out of World War II and the adoption of the dollar as the world's reserve currency created a military, industrial and financial super power unmatched in the world's history. War seemed to be good for America.

Yet the nation's populace seemed to remain ignorant as to the true nature of its perceived wealth. The wars its government has engaged in have been paid for by borrowing, not by using money that had been saved. The resources that may have helped pay for wars have in reality been stolen from indigenous populations at the point of a gun. These resources certainly weren't acquired through voluntary trade. These debts need to be paid back in some form or another, the question is by whom? I certainly don't believe it should be by the common folk who may have tacitly gone along with the war programs but did not orchestrate them. Yet it is the common folk who will pay because of the fiscal and political manipulations of the super wealthy elite who continue to hide and obfuscate their influence in such matters.

The debts are coming due. Those who have loaned the money, regardless of whether or not paper money has any real value, want to be paid back. There is a problem, however, in that the nation is technically bankrupt. And it's not just the United States of America that has this problem, but many nations worldwide take in less revenue than they spend and can no longer afford to pay back even the interest on the loans they've received from various lenders. To solve this problem, governments often feel they can do two things, either raise taxes or cut spending. The United States government has for years decided to put the burden on the backs of their future generations by printing money and inflating the currency supply. I think a better solution would be to stop wasting money on bullets, bombs and engines of destruction. I think it is a good time to stop policing an empire, start closing down bases and bringing home troops, and use the trillions that would be saved by not empire building to pay off the debt and start rebuilding prosperity and wealth.

Yet this is not something that the central banking institutions would have. They wish to keep the common folk in debt. They wish to siphon off the unprecedented wealth that has been enjoyed by the largest and most powerful middle class the world has ever known and horde it in their own coffers. Why not do this by bombing already impoverished people? Why not destroy the infrastructure of nations that are on their way up the socio-economic ladder? Why not use fear, ignorance and the inherent distrust of other cultures to foment a clash of civilizations? In this way, they can keep the wealthier nation in debt and dependent on their good graces and at the same time steal the natural resources of less fortunate nations through the international corporations they control. Why should they care if innocents are killed along the way, as long as their pockets are lined and their coffers filled?

War of any kind does not bring economic prosperity to the masses. It does not bring freedom, liberty or democracy to the people. It brings only death and destruction, the exact opposite of economic prosperity. It brings complete moral degradation. It brings about the enslavement of the masses in one form or another to all the parties involved. It brings about unprecedented profits for a few societal parasites who wish to horde all the wealth for themselves. It brings prosperity only to the fat spiders at the top who spin their webs to entrap all humanity so they can feed upon the misery they create. It is these few wealthy elite who seem to wish for the destruction of all economy who should be held to account, not the common folk. It is they who have failed miserably, for they have shown their utter disdain for humankind and the desperate emotional impoverishment they wallow in when it comes to caring for the less fortunate.

Peace is the way to economic prosperity. Individual freedom is the way to peace. Only by creating and producing will the economy grow, not through killing and destroying. How much more can mankind endure before this lesson is learned? It is time to stop empowering the elite who pull the strings. It is time to stop borrowing their worthless paper money for wars and other destructive government programs they have set up to entrap the masses of humanity. It is time to create alternatives to the monopolies of currency they control and to allow these alternatives to operate unmolested by the government agencies that the wealthy corporate elite have bought and paid for. It is time to stop forcing our empire and corporate world government upon the masses of the world and to start allowing all individuals to operate as the sovereign beings they are. Americans should be leading by example, not by the heavy handed machinations of a militarized police force.

We have seen this sickness before in the world. We have seen historically how empire corrupts and rots away the core of the principles that brought it into being. We have seen how power corrupts and how absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is time for the common folk to shout "Enough!" It is time we refuse to pay for the destruction any longer. It is time to trim back the branches of empire, break the grip of government monopoly and rid ourselves of the tyranny that is now encamped upon our shores. When this happens, the buds of freedom can grow again and perhaps one day blossom into beautiful flowers. When this happens, prosperity will once again visit the common folk and we can all build wealth together.

Szandor Blestman: My archived articles are available at szandorblestman.com. Please visit there and make a donation to help support me and my efforts. I also have an ebook available entitled "The Ouijiers" by Matthew Wayne.

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Robert Scheer: The Tea Party and Goldman Sachs

2011-07-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party and Goldman Sachs: A Love Story

by Robert Scheer article link article link

July 6, 2011 | CommonDreams | TruthDig

Face it. We live in two nations, sharply divided by an enormous economic chasm between the super-rich and everyone else. This should be an obvious fact of life for most Americans. Just read the story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal headlined “Profits Thrive in Weak Recovery.” Or the recent New York Times story pointing out “that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million,” a 23 percent gain over the year before.

In the midst of a jobless recovery, those same corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in reserves, refusing to invest in this country, as increasing percentages of their profits are garnered in tax-sheltered operations abroad. And the bankers who caused the economic meltdown have turned against President Barack Obama, who saved them; instead they favor a tea-party-dominated Republican Party that seeks to limit any restraint on corporate greed while destroying the ability of state and federal governments to bring some measure of relief to ordinary folk.

The whole point of the tea party is to focus concern over our stagnant economy on something called “big government” while ignoring the big corporations that have bought the government as an accessory to their marketing strategies. Big government is big precisely because it now exists primarily to make the world safe for multinational capitalism, whether through a bloated defense budget, trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or monetary policies that serve the interests of the largest companies.

It was their lobbyists who got Congress to end sensible regulations of financial shenanigans, and now, with the new tea party members of Congress as their most stalwart allies, they are yanking the teeth from the very mild regulations that Obama got through the last Congress. As The Associated Press reported: “Congressional Republicans are greeting the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s financial overhaul law by trying to weaken it, nibble by nibble.”

It is nothing short of demagogic for the Republicans to be complaining about the debt when it was the radical deregulatory policies that they pursued which caused all that governmental red ink in the first place. What a hoax to pretend that teachers’ pensions or environmental protections are responsible for a debt that increased by 50 percent as a direct consequence of the banking collapse. Yet they want to gut even the tepid regulations that became law under the Obama administration, foaming at the mouth about sensible regulation as job killing when it is the uncontrolled greed of Wall Street that is at the root of our high unemployment.

Congressional Republicans are cutting funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as if those already underfunded agencies are centers of anti-business radicalism. The CFTC is run by former Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler, who, back when he was in the Clinton Treasury Department serving under another onetime Goldman leader, Robert Rubin, teamed up with Republicans in Congress to gut financial regulation. He is one of the Obama regulators who has managed to delay even the minor controls that the Dodd-Frank law requires for the still wildly out-of-control $600 trillion derivatives market.

What a joke that the tea party assertion that radicals have taken over the Obama government is embraced even by lobbyists for Goldman Sachs, whose former executives have populated the Obama administration as widely as they did the two previous administrations. All they are missing this time around is that they didn’t get to have one of their own named as treasury secretary, as was the case in both the Clinton and Bush cabinets.

This week, the Los Angeles Times reported on Goldman’s renewed lobbying efforts in Washington aimed at watering down what remains of the promise of Dodd-Frank. True to Washington tradition, Goldman has hired Michael Paese, a former top staffer for the “liberal” Rep. Barney Frank to head its Washington operation, which last year spent $4.6 million lobbying Congress to soften the bill, a task now made far easier with Goldman’s tea party allies in the new Republican-dominated House. As the Times noted, “Goldman has spent much of its money on hired guns from major Washington lobbying firms, including former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and former House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).”

Between the faux populism of the tea party and the army of sellout ex-congressional staffers and politicians from both parties, the Washington fix is in. Short of hitting it big on a lottery ticket, the vast majority of Americans are sentenced to a future of lowered expectations, insurmountable personal debt and dismal job prospects.

They may not know it, however, thanks to the constant propaganda from a corporate culture dominated by images of a classless nation in which all consume the delights of the American dream, from the perfect smartphone to the perfect pill for bladder control, while merrily hacking away on the perfectly manicured golf course of one’s fantasies.

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

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Shamus Cooke: How to Save the U.S. Labor Movement

2011-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

How to Save the U.S. Labor Movement

by Shamus Cooke article link article link

July 5, 2011 | Global Research | Workers Action

The first step in saving the labor movement is recognizing that it needs saving. Sadly, many union leaders -- including Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO -- refuse to accept this reality, choosing instead to dismiss the current threats against labor unions as "exaggerated,” or limited to this or that Republican politician. In fact, the labor movement -- especially public sector unions -- is facing nationwide attacks by Democrats and Republicans alike.

On a state-by-state basis unions are being blamed for the budget deficits that are the result of the Great Recession -- itself triggered by Wall Street and fueled by declining taxes on corporations and the rich. This massive recession is certain to create deficits for years to come, guaranteeing that the cross-hairs will remain firmly on the backs of labor unions, since the backs of the corporations escaped the cross-hairs by their domination of the two party system and media.   This anti-union atmosphere will thus grow, and will soon affect all unions, much like high unemployment has already weakened all unions by pushing down wages and lowering union membership. And union membership is already drastically low: with 7 percent private sector unemployment, unions are already facing near extinction. The attack on the public sector, if successful, will completely destroy the power of unions in relation to the power of corporations. Labor's diminishing clout is already recognized by politicians of both parties; indeed, the current attacks would not be happening if it were otherwise. Big business now has undisputed and complete control over both parties. The New York Times reports:

"The reality is that the U.S. labor movement has steadily lost influence, politically, socially and economically. Labor believes that President Barack Obama is taking it too much for granted; he is." (March 7, 2011).

A recent member of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) International Executive Board, Stephen Lerner, was more blunt when he spoke at Pace University: "Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do."

It is in this context that solutions must be proposed, debated, and pursued. Labor unions do not need genius-caliber ideas or fancy gimmicks to save themselves; there are numerous practical, common sense solutions that could be implemented immediately. Below are six:

1) Go on the offensive. No struggle of any kind can be won on a purely defensive basis. Yet many labor unions seem content with continually fending off corporate attackers, taking steps backwards as they do so, since waging defensive campaigns uses precious union resources. Purely defensive campaigns imply weakness, since a powerful organization would choose to use its resources in a more empowering way. Concessionary bargaining is a prime example of unions not flexing their muscle, and sadly, it's become the new norm for many unions, which weaken themselves further with every new concession-filled contract. The union movement will not be able to grow significantly as long as it persists in concessionary bargaining. Who would want to join a union and pay dues if the results are progressively worse contracts?

Labor unions are capable of conjuring powerful social forces when they do go on the offensive. Oregon unions decided to mobilize in favor of a Tax the Rich and Corporation measure that would reduce the state deficit: union members flocked to phone banks and door-to-door canvassing, winning over the community with a landslide election victory that saved hundreds of millions of dollars in social service cuts. The events in Wisconsin proved that unions would have tremendous community support to go on the offensive against the anti-democracy Governor Walker. The non-union working class in Wisconsin correctly viewed the unions' fight as a battle against the status-quo, and they wanted to join.

2) Mobilize the community. One of the biggest mistakes unions have made over the years has been to disconnect themselves from the community. Unions became insular organizations unconcerned with organizing new members or fighting for working people in general, mistakes that can easily be remedied by reversing course. The media is focused on demonizing unions in the eyes of the broader working class, but unions can fight back by waging real campaigns to save Social Security, Medicare, or other national programs like food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, and especially addressing unemployment. Fighting for the unemployed by demanding a public works program would boost the image of unions in the eyes of working people nationwide. The union movement cannot win by itself; it is too small. SEIU has recognized this in their fledgling campaign called Fight For a Fair Economy. But a truly successful campaign would require that all unions become involved.

3) Re-unite the labor movement. It is long overdue for the Change to Win unions and the AFL-CIO to reunite. The progressive vision of the Change to Win unions did not materialize; the labor movement as a whole is weaker because of this divide. New campaigns need to be organized on a national basis, with all unions directing their energy in a coordinated fashion. If the major unions all wage separate campaigns they are doomed to failure.

4) Political Independence. Union leaders should realize that the Democrats don't want to be friends anymore. How many betrayals must it take? The Democrats are attacking teachers’ unions across the country on the state level with "education reforms" that disempower union seniority and create non-union charter schools. On the national level Obama's anti-union Race to the Top education reforms is a blatantly anti-union continuation of Bush's No Child Left Behind program.   Democratic governors across the country are passing "cuts only" budgets at the expense of labor unions and working people while refusing to raise taxes on the rich or close corporate loopholes.

Some labor leaders refuse to mobilize their members against these attacks because union members were mobilized to campaign for these governors only months before! The same is true for President Obama, who received hundreds of millions of dollars from the unions for his election campaign and gave virtually nothing in return. Will Obama's new promises in 2012 fool labor leaders once again or will they engage in self-deception? Sadly, the nation’s largest teachers union, the NEA, has pledged to support Obama's next campaign. It is terribly demoralizing for union members to watch the candidate they endorsed attack their wages and benefits. The electoral strategy has failed -- miserably. Union resources can be used in a multitude of productive ways instead of funding their attackers’ electoral campaigns.

5) Powerful slogans. Union leaders cannot inspire their members to be active in boring campaigns or by using watered down demands. To win any campaign unions need to be able to mobilize their members and the community. This effort requires that unions re-learn how to agitate around important issues while proposing real solutions. The Great Recession is posing this question starkly before the labor movement: how will labor unions fight back against the powerful corporate offensive that was unleashed with the collapse of the economy? How will unions save their members’ benefits while creating jobs for the community at large, when the media claims "there is no money?” Again, no radical solutions are needed. National Nurses United has already come up with the solution: make Wall Street pay! Tax the rich and corporations!

All the labor movement has to do is point to the historically high levels of income inequality and demand that the rich and corporations be taxed to pay for the recession that they caused. No other sector of society can afford to pay for this recession. Unions must point out that taxes on the rich have decreased dramatically over the past three decades, causing these massive deficits. A national campaign to tax the rich and corporations has the capacity to mobilize all working people so that the national and state budget deficits can be fixed -- without slashing Social Security and Medicare -- while a massive public works campaign can be started to create millions of jobs.

6) Take back the streets. None of the pressing social issues of most concern to working people can be addressed by politicians of the Democrat and Republican parties. We've entered a period where politics are being transferred to the streets, where politicians can only be influenced by the implied threat inherent in massive demonstrations, rallies, and mobilized communities. The power demonstrated in Wisconsin showed clearly the direction that labor unions need to go if they want to avoid extinction; the tactics of the last thirty years must be renounced and the strategies of the labor movement's birth must be reclaimed. The massive power that labor unions accumulated up through the 1940's by waging aggressive campaigns in the streets and workplaces was frittered away in consequent decades by union leaders content with making backroom deals with politicians. Labor can either be a friend or feared by the corporate elite, it can't be both.

The initiative to implement these common sense proposals must come first and foremost from rank and file members, since they have suffered the most from the current failed strategy and tactics adopted by top union officials. The rank and file must put unrelenting pressure on the officials to change course and begin to put up a real fight in defense of the membership. If the officials do not respond, then the rank and file can exercise their democratic rights and take appropriate action.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research articles by Shamus Cooke

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Rex Weyler: Deep Green: Why De-Growth?

2011-07-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Deep Green is Rex Weyler's monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace's past, present, and future. The opinions here are his own.

Deep Green: Why De-Growth? An interview

by Rex Weyler article link article link

July 05, 2011 | Countercurrents | Greenpeace

“GDP, the so-called measure of economic growth, does not separate costs from benefits.”

- Herman Daly, World Bank Economist, author of “Steady State Economics.”

In 2008, economists and scientists met in Paris to discuss “Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity.” The Degrowth (Décroissance) movement grew from this economic revolution in France. In 2010, a similar conference convened in Barcelona. For the last two years I have helped organize the Degrowth Conference in Vancouver, Canada. Journalists and traditional economists have asked why a degrowth movement is necessary. Here are answers to their questions:

Why focus on ending growth? Isn’t growth natural?

Yes, growth is natural, but even in nature, growth is limited.

The Degrowth movement addresses the growth of human consumption, driven by economic growth, population growth, and the impacts of resource extraction – oil spills, polluted rivers, atmospheric carbon. System feedbacks such as melting permafrost and methane releases, add to the impact. We can call aggregate human consumption and waste “throughput.”

We now hear talk of “decoupling” economic growth from material and energy throughput, which would be desirable, but we must be realistic because we possess very few actual examples of such decoupling. Historically, economic growth leads to increased energy and materials throughput. For example, some people once claimed that computers would “save paper” but this did not happen. Human society today uses six-times more paper than we did in 1960. Computers accelerated economic growth, and although this yielded benefits to certain sectors of society, the growth required more consumption, ecological devastation, and social inequity.

But don’t we want certain economic sectors to grow, like renewable energy and developing economies?

Yes. But to achieve ecological balance and social justice, we need to respect the limits nature places on material and energy throughput. A social transition can take place without total system growth, but even solar panels and windmills require materials and energy, rare-earth metals, copper, steel, silicon and so forth. We don’t mine copper or silicon with solar energy, we mine them with hydrocarbons.

We need to appreciate the magnitude of the transitions we contemplate. Today, the rich 15-percent of Earth’s people consume about 85-percent of the resources. Meanwhile, our population grows and nations expect their economies to grow by 3-to-4-percent annually. Projecting these growth rates to 2050, a world of 9 billion people with social justice and better living standards, powered with renewable energy would require about 30-times more resources than we consume today. We would be fair and wise to ask: Is that possible?

Furthermore, energy systems – windmills, solar arrays, dams – have fixed life-spans, so even if we built enough renewable energy to power a world of 9 billion people, that infrastructure would have to be built again, and again, forever, to be “sustainable.” In nature, desire does not equal capacity. We have to start with Earth’s capacity and design our cultural transition based on that capacity.

Therefore, the key policy of any ecological energy plan must be conservation, the only solution that does not require material growth. Conservation has to start with wealthy nations. If rich consumers reduced energy consumption by half – possible since rich economies waste so much energy – then the rest of the world could double energy use, and we could still reduce total world energy use. But if we attempt to power the wasteful, consumer culture built on fossil fuel for 9-billion people, we encounter some inconvenient laws of physics, thermodynamics, and ecology.

But can we not become more efficient through innovation?

Yes, but we will need to question our assumptions. Historically, humans have made millions of industrial efficiency gains without reducing consumption. When society achieves efficiency with a resource, it becomes cheaper, so we tend to use more, not less. This phenomenon, documented by William Jevons during the coal era, is known in economics as the rebound effect. Efficiency could reduce consumption, but humanity has a poor track record of doing so. Historically, efficiency gains increased profits or reduced consumer costs, but do not save resources. We can change this but we should not be naive.

But growth is a natural biological and evolutionary impulse.

Yes, growth is not innately evil. However, growth is not innately “good,” and can become destructive even in nature. When our cells don’t stop growing, we have cancer; if our bodies don’t stop growing, that is obesity. Successful species grow until they overshoot their habitat capacity. Growth can become a liability.

Throughout history, certain dominant societies grew until they depleted their habitats. A few learned to simplify, degrow, and endure. Modern advocates of degrowth are not against social diversity or innovation. The degrowth movement is simply cautioning society about the historic link between economic growth and ecosystem destruction. Wishful thinking won’t change this.

Diversity and complexity grow continuously. Does Nature really have a limit on growth?

The word “growth” does not mean the same thing in different contexts. Non-material qualities – species diversity, innovation, or human ideas – can “grow,” but this is quite different from the growth of material things such as populations, cell phones, or power plants.

Even non-physical qualities – beauty, love – require physical foundations with limits. Nature can produce five species of finches or fifty species but nature imposes limits on the total biomass of finches, or forests, humans, or human technical artefacts. Forests reach a limit that we call “maturity,” at which point the forest reaches dynamic homeostasis, roughly stable biomass with shifting diversity.

Humans can create virtually unlimited musical styles, but only a limited number of maple cellos with ebony fingerboards. A biophysical supply chain makes “non-material” social innovation possible. Dreaming up innovations may require near-zero material throughput, but the practical application of those innovations requires energy and materials.

The infrastructure of knowledge – education, books, Internet, conferences – that nurture an environment of ideas, requires throughput. For this reason, cultures that have dominated in technical innovation also dominated in resource consumption. The Internet may feel like “free” information but requires massive materials, energy, and waste sinks. Growth of difference (diversity) is not the same as growth of stuff. We’ll need to be precise about claims that economic growth can avoid throughput growth.

But the biosphere has grown its energy and material throughput for billions of years with no sign of stopping.

This needs to be qualified for two reasons: Growth rates and natural collapse events.

Nature’s growth rates remain tiny compared to human economies. Nations typically attempt to grow their economies at 3-4-percent annually. Since about 1750, this equates to a doubling of human consumption every 20 years. On the other hand, over the last 500-million years, Earth’s biomass has doubled about every 50 million years, 2-million-times slower than human economic and consumption growth. Growth is natural, but not anywhere near the rate that bankers and neoclassical economists want economies to grow.

Secondly, collapse appears frequently in the fossil record and in human history. Biological diversity reached capacity limits not only during the famous “five extinctions” but in thousands of minor extinctions. About 600-million-years-ago (mya), free oxygen allowed cells to extract more energy from the ecosystem, unleashing tremendous diversity growth. However, this growth reached habitat limits many times between 550mya and 200mya, as species diversity crashed, recovered, and crashed again. Growth does stop in nature, and reverses. The rate of diversity growth peaked during the Cambrian era, 550-500mya, and has not been equalled since. Diversity is not a one-way progression; it grows, stutters, collapses, and recovers based on environmental capacity and conditions.

Today, human sprawl reduces Earth’s biological diversity. Humans occupy and impact habitats, replacing and obliterating species. If natural growth was unlimited, then these other species could survive human expansion, but human expansion fills and depletes ecosystems, exposing nature’s limits.

Likewise, we witness cultural diversity growth and simultaneous cultural loss. Industrial growth has diminished cultural diversity as well as species diversity. Historical anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown that when societies grow, they inevitably face problems related to habitat capacity. To solve these problems, they develop new technologies, but these solutions tend to create new problems (irrigation causes salinization, nuclear energy causes leukemia, and so forth.) Highly complex societies eventually experience “diminishing returns” on their innovations, which Tainter explains in The Collapse of Complex Societies. A few societies overcame this dilemma by simplifying their systems, but most overshot their habitat and collapsed. Growth is not a solution for societies in overshoot. Rather, solutions to overshoot involve reduced consumption, simplification, and a return to fundamental rules of ecology.

Human social complexity has grown over the last 100,000 years, punctuated with collapses and ecosystem decline. Human success clearly incurs ecological and social costs. Economist Kenneth Boulding called these ecological and cultural losses the “metabolic costs” of growth. Donella Meadows, and others simply pointed out the “Limits to Growth.” Since human impact now threatens global ecosystem balance, we don’t know if human complexity will continue to grow.

Degrowth advocates suggest that the best strategy to ensure maximum human diversity is to stabilize our consumption and expansion. Dynamic homeostasis, nature’s genuine sustainability, makes demands on growing things, and simplicity proves as important as complexity. The notion of degrowth is not intended to destroy human society, but to preserve it.

If our growth economy recycles as nature does, are we not more sustainable?

Yes, of course, but we need to understand nature’s costs and limits regarding recycling. Human economies should attempt to approach 100-percent recycling, but recycling itself requires energy and materials. In nature, recycling is a cost of life, not just a solutions. The laws of energy transformation teach us that there is no such thing as 100-percent recycling, even in nature, because of these throughput costs.

Attacking growth is counter-productive because people expect growth, and want to find hope.

In the autumn, when leaves fall and the air turns cold, it is not “pessimism” to point out that winter is coming. If hope is delusional, it is futile.

The degrowth movement does not “attack” growth, which has its appropriate place in nature. The degrowth movement simply exposes the pretence of celebrating the benefits of economic growth while ignoring the costs. Rich nations typically ignore the costs of growth by exporting those costs to poor nations and to nature: Sending city garbage to the country, dumping toxic waste at sea, exploiting workers to make products cheap, and devastating the landscape in resource mining. A large portion of China’s CO2 emissions, for example, are really European and American CO2 emissions, because those nations consume the products of that pollution.

Naturally, people resist the idea of limits on their consumption. The instincts to grow were forged in natural evolution, but those instincts don’t make limits disappear. Even in non-human nature, instincts can become counter-productive. Aggression, for example, exists because it had survival value, but in certain contexts aggression becomes destructive. When the context changes, instincts can be harmful. Once a species reaches its habitat limits, the instincts to grow and expand become a liability.

Aren’t ecosystems destroyed just as thoroughly in poor nations as wealthy ones.

Yes, but usually because those nations are plundered and exploited by the rich. Sheer numbers of inhabitants anywhere can deplete an environment, but wealthy-nation industrial expansion is the leading cause of global ecological destruction. Many cultures were sustainable for thousands of years, and could have endured many thousands more, until colonized by industrial nations, which took their resources, took slaves, waged war, practiced genocide, and so forth. In the industrial era, rich nations export destructive resource extraction, waste disposal, and social costs to the poor nations. Africa is not ecologically depleted and poor because Africans consumed too much stuff; it is depleted and poor because Europe and North America plundered it to fuel their economic growth. Now, China, Japan, and other industrialized nations have joined the plunder of poor nations and the global commons. Nature limits population growth, but for humanity, wealthy consumption and economic growth remain the primary causes of ecological destruction.

Rather than degrowth, should we not focus on preserving ecosystems?

If our social, political, and economic planners actually understood ecosystems, we might avoid a lot of problems we face.

But degrowth is not just a rallying cry or a trivial idea. Degrowth is an important, natural concept that our society needs to understand, whether we call it Degrowth, Limits to Growth, Costs of Complexity, Overshoot, Carrying Capacity, Metabolic Costs, Diminishing Returns on Innovation, Entropic Limits, “The Meek Shall inherit the Earth,” or “Richer lives, simpler means” as Arne Naess said.

The problem for our society is not that these ideas are too complex or wrong, but that they are annoying and inconvenient for the wealthy and powerful. Everyone wants more. Millionaires want to be a billionaires. The more that individuals grab and horde, the less there is for everyone. On the other hand, as we learn to share and live modestly, our ecosystems can recover and provide us with nature’s bounty. The best way for poor nations to avoid deeper poverty is to protect their ecosystems from plunder.

The Degrowth movement advocates richer, more rewarding lives with less material stuff. Our economic efforts should focus on providing basic needs to everyone in the human family, rather than enriching a few, while others starve. Beyond basic necessities, happiness does not come from consuming more stuff. Happiness comes from friends, family, community, creativity, leisure, love, companionship, and time spent in nature. These things can grow without much material throughput. These are the qualities of life we should be helping to grow.

This may be the most important public dialogue of this century. And we better get this right, because humanity may not get many more chances.

Rex Weyler was a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, the editor of the organisation's first newsletter, and a co-founder of Greenpeace International in 1979. He was a photographer and reporter on the early Greenpeace whale and seal campaigns, and has written one of the best and most comprehensive histories of the organisation, Greenpeace (Raincoast, 2004). His book, Blood of the Land, a history of the American Indian Movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Deep Green is Rex's monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace's past, present, and future.

Useful resources:

Degrowth Research: Recherche & Décroissance.

Albert Bartlett on Exponential Growth: “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy” video lecture.

William Catton, Overshoot.

Donella Meadows, et. al., Limits to Growth (D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, J. Randers, W. Behrens, 1972; New American Library, 1977).

Herman Daly, Steady-State Economics (1977, 1991).

Mark Anielski: Genuine Wealth.

Lourdes Beneria, Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if People Mattered.

Kenneth Boulding, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966.

Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973, Le Monde also discusses the negative social and ecological impact of high-energy society.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, (1971).

T. Gutowski, et. al. (“Thermodynamic Analysis of Resources Used in Manufacturing Processes,”(PDF) Environ. Sci. Technol. 43(5) pp1584-1590, 2009).

K. De Decker, (2009) “The Monster Footprint of Digital Technology” tracks the embodied energy and material resources of silicon based technology.

Arne Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle.

Wendell Berry, Solving for Pattern, on appropriate solutions (PDF).

Countercurrents home page

Greenpeace home page

Understand The Corporate Tools Used To Control Us

2011-07-05T08:29:00.001-07:00

... Neither Be Partaker Of Other Men's Sins

2011-07-05T08:25:00.000-07:00

Linda Wagner Schmoldt: 'We the People' or 'I the Person'?

2011-07-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

'We the People' or 'I the Person'?

by Linda Wagner Schmoldt article link

July 4, 2011 | CommonDreams

There is a concerted effort these days by the powers that be to break down the structures that allow people to come together.

It is no accident that we see the Supreme Court taking rights and power away from groups of citizens and workers while increasing the powers of the ruling class and corporations. On state and federal levels we see rulings that restrict the formation of unions, negate collective bargaining, and squelch class-action suits.

It is harder and harder to hold public demonstrations and protests as codes, laws, and fees limit where, when and how we can gather. We have lost many of our common spaces--places where we can come together and speak truth to power. The rights of civic/social leaders and organizers are threatened with scrutiny and abuse. Exorbitant prison sentences and fines are imposed on those who gather to protest and/or do civil disobedience. The making of crowd control devices is a strong industry in the U.S. (and in our ally, Israel.) We are becoming a police state and the military is waiting in the wings.

When the news covers demonstrations they always focus on the most radical looking people. They don’t show the old women and the families walking peacefully with their children. The media relishes any show of violence or aggression. The message is clear. These people are not like you. People like you don’t take to the street and protest. We are taught to fear the masses.

And what shall we gather around? It becomes more and more difficult to sort out truth from lies, especially when the lies are echoed across the corporate-owned media and halls of power. Support for Wiki-leaks, or any other organization that exposes the truth behind what is really going on, is labeled as treason. There is a crack down on whistleblowers.

Terrorist alerts and the nightly news, as a police blotter of all the crimes we need to fear, forces us to stay in our homes, to be suspicious of our neighbors and to be fearful of anyone who differs in skin tone, speech, culture or way of life. Report your neighbors; don’t talk to them.

Whole groups of people get labeled as a threat to our security, whether it is gays who want to marry, immigrants who want to earn a fair wage for their labors, teachers and other public “servants” who want to claim the money set aside for their health care or retirement. Our enemies and those we can’t trust increase daily.

We are taught that what are most important are our rights as individuals. Our god is free-enterprise, the unchecked, unregulated right to make as much as we like, even at the expense of our society and our earth. We see regulations as a threat to our individual rights to do business and make a profit.

We are urged to think of ourselves first. If I am not old, why should I pay for those on Social Security or Medicare? If I don’t have children, why should I care about education? If I’m not gay, not an illegal immigrant, not unemployed, not losing my house, not confronting an unwanted pregnancy…

And when crisis affects me, I will blame myself. I will think I am alone. I will think I have to solve my own problems. I certainly won’t blame a broken social system.

Across the world there are huge demonstrations. The powers that be are threatened by masses of people in other countries who force their leaders to put the good of their society ahead of individual and corporate interests. Note the reaction to any resource industry being nationalized. In Venezuela we have spent millions to bring down the popularly-elected Hugo Chavez who has nationalized the oil production and channeled the profits to fund social programs. That’s one of the actions that Muammar Gaddafi was threatening to do as well.

Countries or leaders that might want to put their people first are a threat. We constantly hear about the high taxes individuals pay in socialist countries. If we knew the truth we might start to compare how other countries empower their people by meeting their basic needs--that when the needs of the community are put ahead of individual rights, everyone benefits. We are told the myth that the U.S. is number one and do not see the abysmal ranking of our country on meeting social needs.

To those who want to protect their greedy accumulation of wealth and power, We the people (anywhere) are a scary proposition. God forbid that we should come together and discover our commonality and our strength. We might demand education that teaches us to think. We might start to question. We might want transparency in government or demand truth in the media. We might demand justice and equity, a say over our daily lives.

It is effective to keep us isolated. To use wedge issues to keep us divided. To make us think we aren’t connected to the rest of the world. To keep us suspicious and fearful. To keep us ignorant. To keep us focused on “I the person.”

We, together, are obviously a huge threat, otherwise why is so much effort being expended to keep us apart? Some people this Fourth of July will celebrate their independence and the rights they have as individuals. A few will recognize our interdependence. They realize that we can’t do it alone, that we need community and that democracy is about We the People, not I the Person.

Linda Wagner Schmoldt is a “wonderer, wanderer, writer and social agitator” who lives in Portland, Oregon. linda@schmoldt.us

CommonDreams home page

Katherine M. Acosta: Thank-You For Not “Serving”

2011-07-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

Thank-You For Not “Serving”

by Katherine M. Acosta article link

July 01, 2011 | Countercurrents

Before the parades begin, the flag-waving commences, and the fireworks explode this 4th of July, I want to recognize a large contingent of patriots who help to protect us from terrorism and defend what freedom and democracy we still enjoy. I am speaking of those who decline to enlist or take commissions in our armed forces. My heartfelt thanks go out to all of you from small towns with few employment opportunities, to those who cannot go to college without incurring frightening levels of debt, those who completed college only to enter a bleak jobs market, to the unemployed and under-employed who nevertheless reject military service as a way out of economic troubles. Thank-you for not “serving.”

Thank-you for not adding to the 100,000 plus civilian body count in Iraq, a country that never attacked us, had nothing to do with the September 11th tragedy, and harbored no “weapons of mass destruction.” Thank-you for not contributing to the post-war oppression of Iraqi women, who, before we “liberated” them, enjoyed more rights and greater access to education than women of any country in that region. Thank-you for not adding to the misery of these besieged people, who before we came crashing violently into their land, had reliable sources of clean water and electricity.

Thank-you for not participating in the daily bloodshed perpetrated against civilians in our name through the bombing of Yemen, drone attacks in Pakistan, and the decades long war in Afghanistan (counting the years we funded the mujahideen against the former Soviet Union.) Thank-you for not bombing rebels in Libya along with their oppressors.

Thank-you for not contributing to the blowback we call “terrorism;” that is, the creation of terrorists in response to our warmongering and imperialism throughout the world. Nothing will do more to protect us from terrorism than refraining from the oppressive and brutal activities that inspire it.

Thank-you for not participating, directly or indirectly, in the torture of other human beings. Thank-you for not joining organizations (i.e., our armed forces) that flout the Geneva conventions. Adhering to these rules protects our own troops as much as it does “enemy combatants.” Thank-you for not aiding and abetting “extraordinary rendition” – our ghastly euphemism for the practice of farming out the torture of those we capture to other countries.

Thank-you for not aiding the incarceration of prisoners of war, scooped up on random battlefields, some combatants, some unlucky bystanders, who will never be given a trial and either convicted or proven innocent. The justification and normalization of indefinite detention for foreigners will eventually be used against Americans. The reflective patriot understands this.

Thank-you for not becoming what General Smedley Butler called “gangsters for capitalism” in his 1935 book, War Is A Racket. He wrote:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Thanks to those of you who did not provide “service” to oil companies during the invasion of Iraq by rushing first to secure the oil fields. Thank-you for not enabling the exploitation of Iraq’s oil for the benefit of multinational corporations, the destruction of Afghanistan in pursuit of strategic positions along gas pipeline routes, and the illegal war on Libya, which happens to have the largest oil reserves in Africa.

Thank-you for thinking critically about our government’s stated goals and objectives. Critical thinking is crucial for a viable democracy. By resisting the propaganda and questioning our government’s policies, you protect our democracy more than those who blindly follow orders.

Thanks also to all of you who did enlist, for whatever reason – belief in “the cause,” economic hardship, a desire to protect your country – yet retained your critical thinking skills, and ultimately chose not to re-enlist.

No reasonable person would hold individual troops responsible for the worldwide carnage perpetrated by our government. Obviously, those with their hands on the levers of power ought to be held fully accountable. I would point out, however, that in a democracy, each individual bears some degree, however small, of responsibility for the actions of his country.

So on this 4th of July, I ask all Americans, service members and civilians alike, to honor our democratic traditions by doing a little critical thinking about our various wars and our respective roles in them – even if that role is merely apathy. [Disclosure: I am married to a 24-year veteran of the Air Force, who retired in 1999]. General Butler spent his retirement years critiquing his 33-year career as a Marine and the role of the military in advancing corporate and financial interests (then as now dressed up in the garb of liberation and freedom) through his writing and more than 1200 speeches in 700 cities. Surely we can find a few minutes to follow this patriot’s example.

On this July 4th, I salute Veterans for Peace, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Against the War, Winter Soldiers, and all other veterans who speak out about these wars. And I am deeply grateful to those who have few employment options, yet still choose not to join the military. Thank-you for not “serving.”

Katherine M. Acosta is a freelance writer in Madison, Wisconsin. She holds a PhD in Sociology and is currently working on a script about life in a "post peak" world. She can be contacted at UndisciplinedPhD@gmail.com.

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This Fourth of July, Let's Stop Worrying What the Founders Would Think

History bears little resemblance to the cartoonish view of the birth of the nation that most people hold.

by Joshua Holland article link

AlterNet home page

David Ruhlen: Multi-national Corporations, Personified

2011-07-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

Multi-national Corporations, Personified

by David Ruhlen article link

July 1, 2011 | OpEdNews

Terrible catastrophes loom in our future. Water, oil, food, climate -- all are high on the list of pending and probable disasters. Any of these could be the first to emerge to truly devastate our way of life. And when the you-know-what does hit the fan, no matter which is first, these catastrophes may become mutually reinforcing, and we'll experience the mother of all perfect storms.

The obvious thread common to these impending calamities is that they are man-made. In what is just a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, in only in the last 100 years, we have participated in the accelerated destruction that brings us now to the brink. And yet, incredibly, as we witness these growing trends, as the catastrophes loom larger, we persist in actively feeding and sustaining these calamities of our own making. Yes, we are culpable and, yes, we have enthusiastically partaken; and well, yes, there might be some trouble ahead; but no, we really like our technology and lifestyle. We are comfortably numb to the realities, and besides, there isn't much we can do anyway, is there? It may be cognitive dissonance, or it may be magical thinking, but it's never seemed more true that a body at rest tends to stay at rest.

But if the public is transfixed in the headlights' glare, so too are the policy makers, who are either unable to see, or proudly proclaim their refusal to grasp, the significance of the information made available to them. These are the smartest guys in the room (or so they keep telling us), and yet they continue to ignore or deny the evidence. Their stubborn inaction in the face of these disasters not only represents an absolute failure of public policy and political leadership, but, given the stakes involved, may rise to the level of criminal conspiracy. Of course, by definition a criminal conspiracy requires a co-conspirator, and driving the status quo -- pushing the narrative best captured by the iconic Alfred E Newman's "What, Me Worry?" -- are the multi-national corporations.

It is well known that Big Money's control of the media and messaging allows it to deny these pending calamities, even as corporations drive more profit to the bottom line and stuff more wealth into the pockets of the elite from the very activities that hasten our demise. Their control of the message is so well and widely documented that further proof just seems redundant -- still, it is gratifying that evidence of it so regularly bubbles to the surface.

In fact, just this week we learned that a leading denier of climate change has taken $1 million from the oil and coal industries over the last decade; among his many services on behalf of the skeptic crowd, Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics has sought to weaken a major assessment of global warming by the UN's leading climate science body. And according to the Guardian, documents obtained by Greenpeace under FoIA show that "the Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 in 2005/6, and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum Institute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute." In his comment on these revelations, Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace, is reported to have said: "A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over 20 years by big oil and big coal. Scientists like Dr. Soon, who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists, are pawns."

And so, because it owns the policy and political agenda, Big Money denies our pending calamities through the shills (scientists and politicians, alike) it employs. This is true for water, oil and food as it is for climate change -- as it is for virtually any other you might wish to name. The case of the good Dr. Soon shows again that pay-for-play expertise is readily abundant and will be, sadly, readily sought and employed. These revelations are only mildly discomforting for the multi-nationals (maybe), the disclosures unlikely to alter their behavior, because the cost-benefit is so wildly positive! Corporations have become spectacularly successful in their relentless pursuit of shareholder wealth -- in part -- through their dedicated strategy of co-opting our public officials and experts.

As a result of their success, multi-national corporations are now the world's most dominant economic and political force, and they have become perhaps the greatest threat to mankind in its history. Because they are at the centre of the worst trends and pending catastrophes, and because they actively and aggressively hold the status quo even as they deny them, multi-national corporations are driving a headlong rush to our ultimate demise. And even as they do, multi-national corporations -- personified as they are by our elected officials and the other smart people in the room -- gaze back at us with that goofy expression and say "What, Me Worry?"

Well yes, we need to worry, but we need to do much more. Faced with imminent mortal danger in your own home, would you just settle in to watch Breaking Bad, or would you rouse yourself to make at least a token effort to save yourself and your family? Well dear reader, our global house is on fire, and we are faced with the same collective imperative to act. Because, if we don't, our failure will not only implicate us in this ongoing criminal conspiracy, but will certainly rise to the level of crimes against humanity.

And then we will become the real personification of the multi-national corporations.

David Ruhlen is a writer, musician and activist living in Canada. He notes with great alarm the profoundly negative trends that will increasingly affect us all. And the trends that have come to so completely reflect the human condition are these: Staggering wealth is amassed by the few, while the permanent and growing underclass becomes increasingly irrelevant to those in power. A state of perpetual war now exists, both at home and abroad, where citizens are increasingly monitored and coerced into obedience and submission by governments seeking ever more control. The health of the planet is increasingly at risk and, with it, our very survival. And representative democracy has long-since ceased to reflect our will, as politicians openly cater to the demands of a tiny elite.

OpEdNews articles by David Ruhlen

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Sherwood Ross: US Must End Wars Fought to Hike Corporate Profits

2011-06-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

US Must End Wars Fought to Hike Corporate Profits

by Sherwood Ross article link

June 30, 2011 | Global Research

Humanism has little place in U.S. global affairs these days when government acts as the enforcement arm of capitalism-run-amok.

Especially since WWII, Washington has habitually aligned itself with the goals of U.S. corporations to dominate. In Latin America and elsewhere, it has funded armies of goons that harass, batter, jail, and murder labor leaders and their allies. In Colombia, labor organizers that call a strike put their lives at risk. It's a veritable shooting gallery where trade unionists are targets.

In Iraq, writes Noam Chomsky in “Interventions”(City Lights Books), the occupying forces broke into union offices, arrested leaders, and enforced Saddam Hussein's antilabor laws. Union leaders were killed under mysterious circumstances. Concessions went to bitterly anti-union U.S. firms. New oil contracts went to firms whose executives were personal friends of President George W. Bush.

At home, U.S. corporations---which exhibit zero loyalty to their employees and to the cities that gave them all those tax breaks to locate---put profits first even if it means stripping those cities of their plants; even if it means throwing thousands of loyal staffers out of work; even if it means cheating taxpayers by relocating their headquarters' offshore; even if it means hiring cheap foreign labor.

“We are seeing the Financial Elite of America waging class warfare against the ordinary working men and women of this country who have made it what it is today,” says University of Illinois international legal authority Francis Boyle.

And Noam Chomsky points in Imperial Ambitions (Metropolitan Books): “Corporations barely pay taxes. The corporate tax rate is already very low, but corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they often don't have to pay taxes at all.”

At the same time, he adds, “the general population has gone through 30 years(1975-2005) of either stagnation or decline in real wages, with people working longer hours with fewer benefits. I don't think there's been a period like this in American history.” Meanwhile, corporations harvest record profits.

As sociologist James Petras of Binghamton University points out in his “Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire,”(Clarity): “Today, over 50 percent of the top 500 US (multinational corporations) MNCs earn over half their profits from overseas operations...This tendency will accentuate as US MNCs relocate almost all their operations, including manufacturing, design and execution. They will employ low tech and high tech employees in their pursuit for competitive advantages and high rates of profits.” (This is not to say that some MNCs aren't building schools, housing, highways, and public facilities near their overseas plants.)

Petras noted that Mexican President Carlos Salinas(1988-94) “privatized over 110 public enterprises, opened the borders to subsidized US agricultural exports---ruining over 1.5-million...farmers and peasants---and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. His policies facilitated the US takeover of Mexico's retail trade, real estate, agriculture, industry, banking and communications sectors.

Similar patterns of foreign takeovers were evident throughout the region, especially in Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia where lucrative gas, oil and mining firms were privatized and sold to foreign investors.”

“Oil and energy companies secured exploration rights via corruption by buying out entire ministries in Russia, Nigeria, Angola, Bolivia and Venezuela in the 1990s,” Petras writes. “Securing a toehold in any economic sector of China to exploit cheap labor requires the MNC to pay off a small army of government officials. This is more than compensated by the regime's enforcement of a cheap labor regime, repression of labor discontent and the imposition of state-controlled pro-business 'labor unions.'”

Everywhere one looks, Imperial America is training police departments of friendly dictators in brutal suppression techniques if and when the peasantry demands a bigger share of the pie which they baked. Journalist William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press), U.S. armed forces “are being deployed in well over 100 countries in every part of the world,” countries Washington supplies “with sizable amounts of highly lethal military equipment, and training their armed forces and police in the brutal arts...”

It's no coincidence that as arms become America's No. 1 export, civilian jobs are going down the tubes. Columbia University economist Seymour Melman, interviewed in the Feb., 1992, issue of The Progressive, argued because of its vast expenditures for war the U.S. was “losing millions of productive jobs” in the civilian sector to foreign firms.

“The U.S. economy is in dramatic disrepair compared to Germany and Japan. By concentrating capital on civilian purposes for 45 years they've emerged as the true victors of the Cold War,” Melman said.

More recently, Chomsky wrote: “U.S. military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for over 60 percent of the world total.”

The record of history shows the White House has used CIA and Pentagon muscle to attack nations whose officials wouldn't play ball in the capitalist league. President Eisenhower gave the green light for the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iran. President Kennedy attempted to overthrow Cuba, but failed, in 1961; President Nixon succeeded in overthrowing the legally elected president of Chile in 1973; and President Reagan funded the Contras to wage war against the leftist Sandinistas of Nicaragua.

“Because of Red Scare anxieties,” wrote James Carroll in “House of War”(Houghton Mifflin), “Americans would uncritically accept the maturing of an economic system (capitalism) that, in its effect if not its structure, condemned most of the world to crushing impoverishment. The humane aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism would not be reckoned with in the United States, with dangerous consequences that define the ever more polarized twenty-first century.”

When Cold War presidents gazed upon the world, all they saw was Red. War hero Jimmy Doolittle, who led the first U.S. air strike against Japan in 1942, later as chairman of a special task force reported to President Dwight Eisenhower that the U.S. “must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.

It may be necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.” That, of course, is precisely what happened. The end began to justify any means. The Pentagon even uses its listening devices to steal business information to give U.S. firms an edge over foreign ones.

Fear-mongering American politicians claimed that if just one country went Communist, all its neighbors would topple like dominoes. For decades, the U.S. subsidized anti-Communist Japanese politicians; the CIA secretly lined the pockets of mullahs and ayatollahs in Iran; and the Pentagon plunged recklessly into civil wars such as in Viet Nam using overwhelming force and violence. Ironically, at home the Justice Department, responding to the “Red Scare,” persecuted, tried, and jailed leaders of the U.S. Communist Party, for allegedly advocating the same strategies the Pentagon was actually employing on a massive scale the world over.

Yet all the Pentagon's costly armaments designed to topple Red regimes proved less effective than the protests of the non-violent disciples of Gandhi, such as Solidarity labor union's Lech Walesa in Poland, who led the break out of the Soviet orbit. In Russia, President Mikhail Gorbachev, the advocate of Glasnost, or openness, could see that Soviet-brand Communism was failing his people and began to make changes that permitted private ownership of business.

Similarly, strong-arm capitalism American-style today needs to be transformed. Starting wars to force other nations to privatize natural resources they would prefer to keep under public control is both reprehensible and criminal.

In his treatise “On Human Work” in 1981, Pope John Paul II called for “the primacy of the person over things and of human labour over capital as a whole.” Workers must be paid fairly, allowed to form unions and strike for self-improvement and treated with dignity and respect. Let it be.

Sherwood Ross is director of the Anti-War News Service from Coral Gables, Fla. He was active in the civil rights movement and later as a wire service columnist covering workplace issues. To contribute to his news service or comment, reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com.

Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Global Research articles by Sherwood Ross

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Daniel Trotta: US Cost of War at Least $3.7 Trillion and Counting

2011-06-29T08:34:00.000-07:00

US Cost of War at Least $3.7 Trillion and Counting

by Daniel Trotta article link article link

June 29, 2011 | CommonDreams | Reuters

When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America's wars.

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The final bill will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project "Costs of War" by Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al Qaeda leaders behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion.

Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020. The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study.

In human terms, 224,000 to 258,000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125,000 civilians in Iraq. Many more have died indirectly, from the loss of clean drinking water, healthcare, and nutrition. An additional 365,000 have been wounded and 7.8 million people -- equal to the combined population of Connecticut and Kentucky -- have been displaced.

"Costs of War" brought together more than 20 academics to uncover the expense of war in lives and dollars, a daunting task given the inconsistent recording of lives lost and what the report called opaque and sloppy accounting by the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon.

The report underlines the extent to which war will continue to stretch the U.S. federal budget, which is already on an unsustainable course due to an aging American population and skyrocketing healthcare costs.

It also raises the question of what the United States gained from its multitrillion-dollar investment.

"I hope that when we look back, whenever this ends, something very good has come out of it," Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee, told Reuters in Washington.

SEPT 11, 2001: THE DAMAGE CONTINUES

In one sense, the report measures the cost of 9/11, the American shorthand for the events of September 11, 2001. Nineteen hijackers plus other al Qaeda plotters spent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 on the plane attacks that killed 2,995 people and caused $50 billion to $100 billion in economic damages.

What followed were three wars in which $50 billion amounts to a rounding error. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since.

Was it worth it? That is a question many people want answered, said Catherine Lutz, head of the anthropology department at Brown and co-director of the study.

"We decided we needed to do this kind of rigorous assessment of what it cost to make those choices to go to war," she said. "Politicians, we assumed, were not going to do that kind of assessment."

The report arrives as Congress debates how to cut a U.S. deficit projected at $1.4 trillion this year, roughly a 10th of which can be attributed to direct war spending.

What did the United States gain for its trillions?

Strategically, the results for the United States are mixed. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are dead, but Iraq and Afghanistan are far from stable democracies. Iran has gained influence in the Gulf and the Taliban, though ousted from government, remain a viable military force in Afghanistan.

"The United States has been extremely successful in protecting the homeland," said George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR, a U.S.-based intelligence company.

"Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was capable of mounting very sophisticated, complex, operations on an intercontinental basis. That organization with that capability has not only been substantially reduced, it seems to have been shattered," Friedman said.

Economically, the results are also mixed. War spending may be adding half a percentage point a year to growth in the gross domestic product but that has been more than offset by the negative effects of deficit spending, the report concludes.

COMPREHENSIVE STUDY

Some U.S. government reports have attempted to assess the costs of war, notably a March 2011 Congressional Research Service report that estimated post-September 11 war funding at $1.4 trillion through 2012. The Congressional Budget Office projected war costs through 2021 at $1.8 trillion.

A ground-breaking private estimate was published in the 2008 book "The Three Trillion Dollar War," by Linda Bilmes, a member of the Watson Institute team, and Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. That work revealed how much cost was added by interest on deficit spending and medical care for veterans.

The report draws on those sources and pieces together many others for a more comprehensive picture.

The report also makes special note of Pakistan, a front not generally mentioned along with Iraq and Afghanistan. War has probably killed more people in Pakistan than in neighboring Afghanistan, the report concludes.

Politicians throughout history have underestimated the costs of war, believing they will be shorter and less deadly than reality, said Neta Crawford, the other co-director of the report and a political science professor at Boston University.

The report said former President George W. Bush's administration was "shamelessly politically driven" in underestimating Iraq war costs before the 2003 invasion.

Most official sources continue to overlook costs, largely because of a focus on just Pentagon spending, Crawford said.

"Over the last decade, we have spent a trillion dollars on war," Obama said in last week's speech on reducing U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. At the very least, he was rounding down by $200 billion to $300 billion, when counting U.S. congressional appropriations for the post 9/11 wars.

"I don't know what the president knows, but I wish it were a trillion," Crawford said. "It would be better if it were a trillion."

ELUSIVE NUMBER

In theory, adding up the dollars spent and lives lost should be a statistical errand. The U.S. Congress appropriates the money, and a life lost on battlefield should have a death certificate and a casket to match.

The team quickly discovered, however, the task was far more complicated.

Specific war spending over the past 10 years, when expressed in 2011 dollars, comes to $1.3 trillion, the "Costs of War" project found. When it comes to accounting for every dollar, that $1.3 trillion is merely a good start.

Since the wars have been financed by deficit spending, interest must be paid -- $185 billion of accumulated so far.

The Pentagon has received an additional $326 billion to $652 billion beyond what can be attributed to the war appropriations, the study found.

Homeland security spending has totaled another $401 billion so far that can be traced to September 11. War-related foreign aid: another $74 billion.

Then comes caring for U.S. veterans of war. Nearly half of the 1.25 million who have served in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan have used their status as veterans to make health or disability claims at an expense of $32.6 billion to date.

Those costs will soar over the next 40 years as veterans age. The report estimates the U.S. obligations to the veterans will reach $589 billion to $934 billion through 2050.

So far, those numbers add up to a low estimate of $2.9 trillion and a moderate estimate of $3.6 trillion in costs to the U.S. Treasury. No high estimate was offered.

"We feel a conservative measure of costs is plenty large to attract attention," said report contributor Ryan Edwards, an economist who studied the war impact on deficit spending.

Those numbers leave out hundreds of billions in social costs not born by the U.S. taxpayer but by veterans and their families: another $295 billion to $400 billion, increasing the range of costs to date to some $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion.

That's a running total through fiscal 2011. Add another $453 billion in war-related spending projected for 2012 to 2020 and the total grows to $3.668 trillion to $4.444 trillion.

THE HUMAN TOLL

If the financial costs are elusive, so too is the human toll.

The report estimates between 224,475 and 257,655 have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, though those numbers give a false sense of precision. There are many sources of data on civilian deaths, most with different results.

The civilian death toll in Iraq -- 125,000 -- and the number of Saddam's security forces killed in invasion -- 10,000 -- are loose estimates. The U.S. military does not publish a thorough accounting.

"We don't do body counts," Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander in Iraq, famously said after the fall of Saddam in 2003.

In Afghanistan, the civilian death count ranges from 11,700 to 13,900. For Pakistan, where there is little access to the battlefield and the United States fights mostly through aerial drone attacks, the study found it impossible to distinguish between civilian and insurgent deaths.

The numbers only consider direct deaths -- people killed by bombs or bullets. Estimates for indirect deaths in war vary so much that researchers considered them too arbitrary to report.

"When the fighting stops, the indirect dying continues. It's in fact worse than land mines. The healthcare system is still in bad shape. People are still suffering the effects of malnutrition and so on," Crawford said.

Even where the United States does do body counts -- for the members of the military -- the numbers may come up short of reality, said Lutz, the study's co-director. When veterans return home, they are more likely to die in suicides and automobile accidents.

"The rate of chaotic behavior," she said, "is high."

(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Missy Ryan, Brett Gering, Laura MacInnis and Sharon Reich; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

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The Business of America Is War

by Stephen Lendman article link

June 29, 2011 | OpEdNews

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Prophets of War

interview with William Hartung program link (mp3)

January 13, 2011 | Mind Over Matters

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Interview with William Hartung Director of the Arms & Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and author of "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex"

Robert Parry: How Greed Destroys America

2011-06-29T08:25:00.000-07:00

Exclusive: New studies show that America’s corporate chieftains are living like kings while the middle class stagnates and shrivels. Yet, the Tea Party and other anti-tax forces remain determined to protect the historically low tax rates of the rich and push the burden of reducing the federal debt onto the rest of society, a curious approach explored by Robert Parry.

How Greed Destroys America

by Robert Parry article link article link

June 28, 2011 | CommonDreams | Consortiumnews

If the “free-market” theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman were correct, the United States of the last three decades should have experienced a golden age in which the lavish rewards flowing to the titans of industry would have transformed the society into a vibrant force for beneficial progress.

After all, it has been faith in “free-market economics” as a kind of secular religion that has driven U.S. government policies – from the emergence of Ronald Reagan through the neo-liberalism of Bill Clinton into the brave new world of House Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan.

By slashing income tax rates to historically low levels – and only slightly boosting them under President Clinton before dropping them again under George W. Bush – the U.S. government essentially incentivized greed or what Ayn Rand liked to call “the virtue of selfishness.”

Further, by encouraging global “free trade” and removing regulations like the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banks, the government also got out of the way of “progress,” even if that “progress” has had crushing results for many middle-class Americans.

True, not all the extreme concepts of author/philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Milton Friedman have been implemented – there are still programs like Social Security and Medicare to get rid of – but their “magic of the market” should be glowing by now.

We should be able to assess whether laissez-faire capitalism is superior to the mixed public-private economy that dominated much of the 20th Century.

The old notion was that a relatively affluent middle class would contribute to the creation of profitable businesses because average people could afford to buy consumer goods, own their own homes and take an annual vacation with the kids. That “middle-class system,” however, required intervention by the government as the representative of the everyman.

Beyond building a strong infrastructure for growth – highways, airports, schools, research programs, a safe banking system, a common defense, etc. – the government imposed a progressive tax structure that helped pay for these priorities and also discouraged the accumulation of massive wealth.

After all, the threat to a healthy democracy from concentrated wealth had been known to American leaders for generations.

A century ago, it was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who advocated for a progressive income tax and an estate tax. In the 1930s, it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, who dealt with the economic and societal carnage that under-regulated financial markets inflicted on the nation during the Great Depression.

With those hard lessons learned, the federal government acted on behalf of the common citizen to limit Wall Street’s freewheeling ways and to impose high tax rates on excessive wealth.

So, during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency of the 1950s, the marginal tax rate on the top tranche of earnings for the richest Americans was about 90 percent. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top rate was still around 70 percent.

Discouraging Greed

Greed was not simply frowned upon; it was discouraged.

Put differently, government policy was to maintain some degree of egalitarianism within the U.S. political-economic system. And to a remarkable degree, the strategy worked.

The American middle class became the envy of the world, with otherwise average folk earning enough money to support their families comfortably and enjoy some pleasures of life that historically had been reserved only for the rich.

Without doubt, there were serious flaws in the U.S. system, especially due to the legacies of racism and sexism. And it was when the federal government responded to powerful social movements that demanded those injustices be addressed in the 1960s and 1970s, that an opening was created for right-wing politicians to exploit resentments among white men, particularly in the South.

By posing as populists hostile to “government social engineering,” the Right succeeded in duping large numbers of middle-class Americans into seeing their own interests – and their “freedom” – as in line with corporate titans who also decried federal regulations, including those meant to protect average citizens, like requiring seat belts in cars and discouraging cigarette smoking.

Amid the sluggish economy of the 1970s, the door swung open wider for the transformation of American society that had been favored by the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, putting the supermen of industry over the everyman of democracy.

Friedman tested out his “free-market” theories in the socio-economic laboratories of brutal military dictatorships in Latin America, most famously collaborating with Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet who crushed political opponents with torture and assassinations.

Ayn Rand became the darling of the American Right with her books, such as Atlas Shrugged, promoting the elitist notion that brilliant individuals represented the engine of society and that government efforts to lessen social inequality or help the average citizen were unjust and unwise.

The Pied Piper

Yet, while Rand and Friedman gave some intellectual heft to “free-market” theories, Ronald Reagan proved to be the perfect pied piper for guiding millions of working Americans in a happy dance toward their own serfdom.

In his first inaugural address, Reagan declared that “government is the problem” – and many middle-class whites cheered.

However, what Reagan’s policies meant in practice was a sustained assault on the middle class: the busting of unions, the export of millions of decent-paying jobs, and the transfer of enormous wealth to the already rich. The tax rates for the wealthiest were slashed about in half. Greed was incentivized.

Ironically, the Reagan era came just as technology – much of it created by government-funded research – was on the cusp of creating extraordinary wealth that could have been shared with average Americans. Those benefits instead accrued to the top one or two percent.

The rich also benefited from the off-shoring of jobs, exploiting cheap foreign labor and maximizing profits. The only viable way for the super-profits of “free trade” to be shared with the broader U.S. population was through taxes on the rich. However, Reagan and his anti-government true-believers made sure that those taxes were kept at historically low levels.

The Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman theories may have purported to believe that the “free market” would somehow generate benefits for the society as a whole, but their ideas really represented a moralistic frame which held that it was somehow right that the wealth of the society should go to its “most productive” members and that the rest of us were essentially “parasites.”

Apparently, special people like Rand also didn’t need to be encumbered by philosophical consistency. Though a fierce opponent of the welfare state, Rand secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to one of her assistants.

She connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using an altered spelling of her first name and her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as justifying Rand’s move by saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.” Yet, it didn’t seem to matter much if “average” Americans were wiped out.

Essentially, the Right was promoting the Social Darwinism of the 19th Century, albeit in chic new clothes. The Gilded Age from a century ago was being recreated behind Reagan’s crooked smile, Clinton’s good-ole-boy charm and George W. Bush’s Texas twang.

Whenever the political descendants of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt tried to steer the nation back toward programs that would benefit the middle class and demand greater sacrifice from the super-rich, the wheel was grabbed again by politicians and pundits shouting the epithet, “tax-and-spend.”

Many average Americans were pacified by reminders of how Reagan made them feel good with his rhetoric about “the shining city on the hill.”

The Rand/Friedman elitism also remains alive with today’s arguments from Republicans who protest the idea of raising taxes on businessmen and entrepreneurs because they are the ones who “create the jobs,” even if there is little evidence that they are actually creating American jobs.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who is leading the fight to replace Medicare with a voucher system that envisions senior citizens buying health insurance from profit-making companies, cites Ayn Rand as his political inspiration.

A Land for Billionaires

The consequences of several decades of Reaganism and its related ideas are now apparent. Wealth has been concentrated at the top with billionaires living extravagant lives that not even monarchs could have envisioned, while the middle class shrinks and struggles, with one everyman after another being shoved down into the lower classes and into poverty.

Millions of Americans forego needed medical care because they can’t afford health insurance; millions of young people, burdened by college loans, crowd back in with their parents; millions of trained workers settle for low-paying jobs; millions of families skip vacations and other simple pleasures of life.

Beyond the unfairness, there is the macro-economic problem which comes from massive income disparity. A healthy economy is one where the vast majority people can buy products, which can then be manufactured more cheaply, creating a positive cycle of profits and prosperity.

With Americans unable to afford the new car or the new refrigerator, American corporations see their domestic profit margins squeezed. So they are compensating for the struggling U.S. economy by expanding their businesses abroad in developing markets, but they also keep their profits there.

There are now economic studies that confirm what Americans have been sensing in their own lives, though the mainstream U.S. news media tends to attribute these trends to cultural changes, rather than political choices.

For instance, the Washington Post published a lengthy front-page article on June 19, describing the findings of researchers who gained access to economic data from the Internal Revenue Service which revealed which categories of taxpayers were making the high incomes.

To the surprise of some observers, the big bucks were not flowing primarily to athletes or actors or even stock market speculators. America’s new super-rich were mostly corporate chieftains.

As the Post’s Peter Whoriskey framed the story, U.S. business underwent a cultural transformation from the 1970s when chief executives believed more in sharing the wealth than they do today.

The article cites a U.S. dairy company CEO from the 1970s, Kenneth J. Douglas, who earned the equivalent of about $1 million a year. He lived comfortably but not ostentatiously. Douglas had an office on the second floor of a milk distribution center, and he turned down raises because he felt it would hurt morale at the plant, Whoriskey reported.

However, just a few decades later, Gregg L. Engles, the current CEO of the same company, Dean Foods, averages about 10 times what Douglas made. Engles works in a glittering high-rise office building in Dallas; owns a vacation estate in Vail, Colorado; belongs to four golf clubs; and travels in a $10 million corporate jet. He apparently has little concern about what his workers think.

“The evolution of executive grandeur – from very comfortable to jet-setting – reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening,” Whoriskey reported.

“For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent.

“But economists had little idea who these people were. How many were Wall Street financiers? Sports stars? Entrepreneurs? Economists could only speculate, and debates over what is fair stalled. Now a mounting body of economic research indicates that the rise in pay for company executives is a critical feature in the widening income gap.”

Jet-Setting Execs

The Post article continued: “The largest single chunk of the highest-income earners, it turns out, are executives and other managers in firms, according to a landmark analysis of tax returns by economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley T. Heim. These are not just executives from Wall Street, either, but from companies in even relatively mundane fields such as the milk business.

“The top 0.1 percent of earners make about $1.7 million or more, including capital gains. Of those, 41 percent were executives, managers and supervisors at non-financial companies, according to the analysis, with nearly half of them deriving most of their income from their ownership in privately-held firms.

“An additional 18 percent were managers at financial firms or financial professionals at any sort of firm. In all, nearly 60 percent fell into one of those two categories. Other recent research, moreover, indicates that executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has roughly quadrupled in real terms since the 1970s, even as pay for 90 percent of America has stalled.”

While these new statistics are striking – suggesting a broader problem with high-level greed than might have been believed – the Post ducked any political analysis that would have laid blame on Ronald Reagan and various right-wing economic theories.

In a follow-up editorial on June 26, the Post lamented the nation’s growing income inequality but shied away from proposing higher marginal tax rates on the rich or faulting the past several decades of low tax rates. Instead, the Post suggested perhaps going after deductions on employer-provided health insurance and mortgage interest, tax breaks that also help middle-class families.

It appears that in Official Washington and inside the major U.S. news media the idea of learning from past presidents, including the Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower, is a non-starter. Instead there’s an unapologetic embrace of the theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, an affection that can pop out at unusual moments.

Addressing a CNBC “Fast Money” panel last year, movie director Oliver Stone was taken aback when one CNBC talking head gushed how Stone’s “Wall Street” character Gordon Gecko had been an inspiration, known for his famous comment, “Greed is good.” A perplexed Stone responded that Gecko, who made money by breaking up companies and eliminating jobs, was meant to be a villain.

However, the smug attitude of the CNBC stock picker represented a typical tribute to Ronald Reagan’s legacy. After all, greed did not simply evolve from some vague shift in societal attitudes, as the Post suggests. Rather, it was stimulated – and rewarded – by Reagan’s tax policies.

Reagan’s continued popularity also makes it easier for today’s “no-tax-increase” crowd to demand only spending cuts as a route to reducing the federal debt, an ocean of red ink largely created by the tax cuts of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Tea Partiers, in demanding even more cuts in government help for average citizens and even more tax cuts for the rich, represent only the most deluded part of middle-class America. A recent poll of Americans rated Reagan the greatest U.S. president ever, further enshrining his anti-government message in the minds of many Americans, even those in the battered middle class.

When a majority of Americans voted for Republicans in Election 2010 – and with early polls pointing toward a likely GOP victory in the presidential race of 2012 – it’s obvious that large swaths of the population have no sense of what’s in store for them as they position their own necks under the boots of corporate masters.

The only answer to this American crisis would seem to be a reenergized and democratized federal government fighting for average citizens and against the greedy elites. But – after several decades of Reaganism, with the “free market” religion the new gospel of the political/media classes – that seems a difficult outcome to achieve.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

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Michael Parenti: Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy

2011-06-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy

(From the book "Dirty Truths" (1996))

by Michael Parenti article link

June 28, 2011 | Information Clearing House

Why has the United States government supported counterinsurgency in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and many other places around the world, at such a loss of human life to the populations of those nations? Why did it invade tiny Grenada and then Panama? Why did it support mercenary wars against progressive governments in Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, Western Sahara, South Yemen, and elsewhere?

Is it because our leaders want to save democracy? Are they concerned about the well-being of these defenseless peoples? Is our national security threatened? I shall try to show that the arguments given to justify U.S. policies are false ones.

But this does not mean the policies themselves are senseless. American intervention may seem "wrongheaded" but, in fact, it is fairly consistent and horribly successful.

The history of the United States has been one of territorial and economic expansionism, with the benefits going mostly to the U.S. business class in the form of growing investments and markets, access to rich natural resources and cheap labor, and the accumulation of enormous profits.

The American people have had to pay the costs of empire, supporting a huge military establishment with their taxes, while suffering the loss of jobs, the neglect of domestic services, and the loss of tens of thousands of American lives in overseas military ventures.

The greatest costs, of course, have been borne by the peoples of the Third World who have endured poverty, pillage, disease, dispossession, exploitation, illiteracy, and the widespread destruction of their lands, cultures, and lives.

As a relative latecomer to the practice of colonialism, the United States could not match the older European powers in the acquisition of overseas territories. But the United States was the earliest and most consummate practitioner of neoimperialism or neocolonialism, the process of dominating the politico-economic life of a nation without benefit of direct possession.

Almost half a century before the British thought to give a colonized land its nominal independence, as in India-while continuing to exploit its labor and resources, and dominate its markets and trade-the United States had perfected this practice in Cuba and elsewhere.

In places like the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua, and when dealing with Native American nations, U.S. imperialism proved itself as brutal as the French in Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Spaniards in South America, the Portuguese in Angola, the Italians in Libya, the Germans in Southwest Africa, and the British almost everywhere else. Not long ago, U.S. military forces delivered a destruction upon Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia that surpassed anything perpetuated by the older colonizers. And today, the U.S. counterinsurgency apparatus and surrogate security forces in Latin America and elsewhere sustain a system of political assassination, torture, and repression unequaled in technological sophistication and ruthlessness.

All this is common knowledge to progressive critics of U.S policy, but most Americans would be astonished to hear of it. They have been taught that, unlike other nations, their country has escaped the sins of empire and has been a champion of peace and justice among nations. This enormous gap between what the United States does in the world and what Americans think their nation is doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.

It should be noted, though, that despite the endless propaganda barrage emanating from official sources and the corporate-owned major media, large sectors of the public have throughout U.S. history displayed an anti-interventionist sentiment, an unwillingness to commit U.S. troops to overseas actions-a sentiment facilely labeled "isolationism" by the interventionists.

The Rational Function of Policy Myths

Within U.S. ruling circles there are differences of opinion regarding interventionist policy. There are conservatives who complain that U.S. policy is plagued by weakness and lacks toughness and guts and all the other John Wayne virtues. And there are liberals who say U.S. policy is foolish and relies too heavily on military solutions and should be more flexible and co-optive when protecting and advancing the interests of the United States (with such interests usually left unspecified).

A closer look reveals that U.S. foreign policy is neither weak nor foolish, but on the contrary is rational and remarkably successful in reproducing the conditions for the continued international expropriation of wealth, and that while it has suffered occasional setbacks, the people who run the foreign policy establishment in Washington know what they are doing and why they are doing it.

If the mythology they offer as justification for their policies seems irrational, this does not mean that the policies themselves are irrational from the standpoint of the class interests of those who pursue such policies. This is true of domestic myths and policies as well as those pertaining to foreign policy.

Once we grasp this, we can see how notions and arrangements that are harmful, wasteful, indeed, destructive of human and social values-and irrational from a human and social viewpoint-are not irrational for global finance capital because the latter has no dedication to human and social values. Capitalism has no loyalty to anything but itself, to the accumulation of wealth. Once we understand that, we can see the cruel rationality of the seemingly irrational myths that Washington policy makers peddle. Some times what we see as irrational is really the discrepancy between what the myth wants us to believe and what is true.

But again this does not mean the interests served are stupid or irrational, as the liberals like to complain. There is a difference between confusion and deception, a difference between stupidity and subterfuge. Once we understand the underlying class interests of the ruling circles, we will be less mystified by their myths.

A myth is not an idle tale or a fanciful story but a powerful cultural force used to legitimate existing social relations. The interventionist mythology does just that, by emphasizing a community of interests between interventionists in Washington and the American people when in fact there is none, and by blurring over the question of who pays and who profits from U.S. global interventionism.

The mythology has been with us for so long and much of it sufficiently internalized by the public as to be considered part of the political culture. The interventionist mythology, like all other cultural beliefs, does not just float about in space. It must be mediated through a social structure. The national media play a crucial role in making sure that no fundamentally critical views of the rationales underlying and justifying U.S. policy gain national exposure. A similar role is played by the various institutes and policy centers linked to academia and, of course, by political lead ers themselves.

Saving Democracy with Tyranny

Our leaders would have us believe we intervened in Nicaragua, for instance, because the Sandinista government was opposed to democracy. The U.S.-supported invasion by right-wing Nicaraguan mercenaries was an "effort to bring them to elections." Putting aside the fact that the Sandinistas had already conducted fair and open elections in 1984, we might wonder why U.S. leaders voiced no such urgent demand for free elections and Western-style parliamentarism during the fifty years that the Somoza dictatorship-installed and supported by the United States-plundered and brutalized the Nicaraguan nation.

Nor today does Washington show any great concern for democracy in any of the U.S.-backed dictatorships around the world (unless one believes that the electoral charade in a country like El Salvador qualifies as "democracy").

If anything, successive U.S. administrations have worked hard to subvert constitutional and popularly accepted governments that pursued policies of social reform favorable to the downtrodden and working poor. Thus the U.S. national security state was instrumental in the overthrow of popular reformist leaders such as Arbenz in Guatemala, Jagan in Guyana, Mossadegh in Iran, Bosch in the Dominican Republic, Sukarno in Indonesia, Goulart in Brazil, and Allende in Chile.

And let us not forget how the United States assisted the militarists in overthrowing democratic governments in Greece, Uruguay, Bolivia, Pakistan, Thailand, and Turkey. Given this record, it is hard to believe that the CIA trained, armed, and financed an expeditionary force of Somocista thugs and mercenaries out of a newly acquired concern for Western-style electoral politics in Nicaragua.

In defense of the undemocratic way U.S. leaders go about "saving democracy," our policy makers offer this kind of sophistry: "We cannot always pick and choose our allies. Sometimes we must support unsavory right-wing authoritarian regimes in order to prevent the spread of far more repressive totalitarian communist ones."

But surely, the degree of repression cannot be the criterion guiding White House policy, for the United States has supported some of the worst butchers in the world: Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, Salazar in Portugal, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, Zia in Pakistan, Evren in Turkey, and even Pol Pot in Cambodia.

In the 1965 Indonesian coup, the military slaughtered 500,000 people, according to the Indonesian chief of security (New York Times, 12/21/77; some estimates run twice as high), but this did not deter U.S. leaders from assisting in that takeover or from maintaining cozy relations with the same Jakarta regime that subsequently perpetuated a campaign of repression and mass extermination in East Timor.

U.S. leaders and the business-owned mainstream press describe "Marxist rebels" in countries like El Salvador as motivated by a lust for conquest. Our leaders would have us believe that revolutionaries do not seek power in order to eliminate hunger; they simply hunger for power. But even if this were true, why would that be cause for opposing them?

Washington policy makers have never been bothered by the power appetites of the "moderate" right-wing authoritarian executionists, torturers, and militarists.

In any case, it is not true that leftist governments are more repressive than fascist ones. The political repression under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was far less than what went on under Somoza. The political repression in Castro's Cuba is mild compared to the butchery perpetrated by the free-market Batista regime. And the revolutionary government in Angola treats its people much more gently than did the Portuguese colonizers.

Furthermore, in a number of countries successful social revolutionary movements have brought a net increase in individual freedom and well-being by advancing the conditions for health and human life, by providing jobs and education for the unemployed and illiterate, by using economic resources for social development rather than for corporate profit, and by overthrowing brutal reactionary regimes, ending foreign exploitation, and involving large sectors of the populace in the task of rebuilding their countries. Revolutions can extend a number of real freedoms without destroying those freedoms that never existed under prior reactionary regimes.

Who Threatens Whom?

Our policy makers also argue that right-wing governments, for all their deficiencies, are friendly toward the United States, while communist ones are belligerent and therefore a threat to U.S. security. But, in truth, every Marxist or left-leaning country, from a great power like the Soviet Union to a small power like Vietnam or Nicaragua to a minipower like Grenada under the New Jewel Movement, sought friendly diplomatic and economic relations with the United States.

These governments did so not necessarily out of love and affection for the United States, but because of something firmer-their own self-interest. As they themselves admitted, their economic development and political security would have been much better served if they could have enjoyed good relations with Washington.

If U.S. Ieaders justify their hostility toward leftist governments on the grounds that such nations are hostile toward us, what becomes the justification when these countries try to be friendly? When a newly established revolutionary or otherwise dissident regime threatens U.S. hegemonic globalists with friendly relations, this does pose a problem.

The solution is to (1) launch a well-orchestrated campaign of disinformation that heaps criticism on the new government for imprisoning the butchers, assassins, and torturers of the old regime and for failing to institute Western electoral party politics; (2) denounce the new government as a threat to our peace and security; (3) harass and destabilize it and impose economic sanctions; and (4) attack it with counterrevolutionary surrogate forces or, if necessary, U.S. troops. Long before the invasion, the targeted country responds with angry denunciations of U.S. policy.

It moves closer to other "outlawed" nations and attempts to build up its military defenses in anticipation of a U.S.-sponsored attack. These moves are eagerly seized upon by U.S. officials and media as evidence of the other country's antagonism toward the United States, and as justification for the policies that evoked such responses.

Yet it is difficult to demonstrate that small countries like Grenada and Nicaragua are a threat to U.S. security. We remember the cry of the hawk during the Vietnam war: "If we don't fight the Vietcong in the jungles of Indochina, we will have to fight them on the beaches of California."

The image of the Vietnamese getting into their PT boats and crossing the Pacific to invade California was, as Walter Lippmann noted at the time, a grievous insult to the U.S. Navy. The image of a tiny ill-equipped Nicaraguan army driving up through Mexico and across the Rio Grande in order to lay waste to our land is equally ludicrous.

The truth is, the Vietnamese, Cubans, Grenadians, and Nicaraguans have never invaded the United States; it is the United States that has invaded Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua, and it is our government that continues to try to isolate, destabilize, and in other ways threaten any country that tries to drop out of the global capitalist system or even assert an economic nationalism within it.

Remember the Red Menace

For many decades of cold war, when all other arguments failed, there was always the Russian bear. According to our cold warriors, small leftist countries and insurgencies threatened our security because they were extensions of Soviet power. Behind the little Reds there supposedly stood the Giant Red Menace.

Evidence to support this global menace thesis was sometimes farfetched. President Carter and National Security Advisor Brezinski suddenly discovered a "Soviet combat brigade" in Cuba in 1979- which turned out to be a noncombat unit that had been there since 1962. This did not stop President Reagan from announcing to a joint session of Congress several years later: "Cuba is host to a Soviet combat brigade...."

In 1983, in a nationally televised speech, Reagan pointed to satellite photos that revealed the menace of three Soviet helicopters in Nicaragua. Sandinista officials subsequently noted that the helicopters could be seen by anyone arriving at Managua airport and, in any case, posed no military threat to the United States. Equally ingenious was the way Reagan transformed a Grenadian airport, built to accommodate direct tourist flights, into a killer-attack Soviet forward base, and a twenty-foot-deep Grenadian inlet into a potential Soviet submarine base.

In 1967 Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued that U.S. national security was at stake in Vietnam because the Vietnamese were puppets of "Red China" and if China won in Vietnam, it would overrun all of Asia and this supposedly would be the beginning of the end for all of us. Later we were told that the Salvadoran rebels were puppets of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua who were puppets of the Cubans who were puppets of the Russians.

In truth, there was no evidence that Third World peoples took up arms and embarked upon costly revolutionary struggles because some sinister ringmaster in Moscow or Peking cracked the whip. Revolutions are not push-button affairs; rather, they evolve only if there exits a reservoir of hope and grievance that can be galvanized into popular action. Revolutions are made when large segments of the population take courage from each other and stand up to an insufferable social order.

People are inclined to endure great abuses before risking their lives in confrontations with vastly superior armed forces. There is no such thing as a frivolous revolution, or a revolution initiated and orchestrated by a manipulative cabal residing in a foreign capital.

Nor is there evidence that once the revolution succeeded, the new leaders placed the interests of their country at the disposal of Peking or Moscow. Instead of becoming the willing puppets of "Red China," as our policy makers predicted, Vietnam found itself locked in combat with its neighbor to the north. And, as noted earlier, almost every Third World revolutionary country has tried to keep its options open and has sought friendly diplomatic and economic relations with the United States.

Why then do U.S. Ieaders intervene in every region and almost every nation in the world, either overtly with U.S. military force or covertly with surrogate mercenary forces, death squads, aid, bribes, manipulated media, and rigged elections? Is all this intervention just an outgrowth of a deeply conditioned anticommunist ideology? Are U.S. Ieaders responding to the public's longstanding phobia about the Red Menace?

Certainly many Americans are anticommunist, but this sentiment does not translate into a demand for overseas interventionism. Quite the contrary. Opinion polls over the last half-century have shown repeatedly that the U.S. public is not usually supportive of com mitting U.S. forces in overseas engagements and prefers friendly relations with other nations, including communist ones. Far from galvanizing our leaders into interventionist actions, popular opinion has been one of the few restraining influences.

There is no denying, however, that opinion can sometimes be successfully manipulated by jingoist ventures. The invasion of Grenada and the slaughter perpetrated against Iraq are cases in point. The quick, easy, low-cost wins reaffirmed for some Americans the feeling that we were not weak and indecisive, not sitting ducks to some foreign prey.

But even in these cases, it took an intensive and sustained propaganda barrage of half-truths and lies by the national security state and its faithful lackeys in the national media to muster some public support for military actions against Grenada and Iraq.

In sum, various leftist states do not pose a military threat to U.S. security; instead, they want to trade and live in peace with us, and are much less abusive and more helpful toward their people than the reactionary regimes they replaced.

In addition, U.S. Ieaders have shown little concern for freedom in the Third World and have helped subvert democracy in a number of nations. And popular opinion generally opposes interventionism by lopsided majorities. What then motivates U.S. policy and how can we think it is not confused and contradictory?

The answer is that Marxist and other leftist or revolutionary states do pose a real threat, not to the United States as a national entity and not to the American people as such, but to the corporate and financial interests of our country, to Exxon and Mobil, Chase Manhattan and First National, Ford and General Motors, Anaconda and U.S. Steel, and to capitalism as a world system.

The problem is not that revolutionaries accumulate power but that they use power to pursue substantive policies that are unacceptable to U.S. ruling circles. What bothers our political leaders (and generals, investment bankers, and corporate heads) is not the supposed lack of political democracy in these countries but their attempts to construct economic democracy, to depart from the impoverishing rigors of the international free market, to use capital and labor in a way that is inimical to the interests of multinational corporatism.

A New York Times editorial (3/30/83) referred to "the undesirable and offensive Managua regime" and the danger of seeing "Marxist power ensconced in Managua." But what specifically is so dangerous about "Marxist power ?"

What was undesirable and offensive about the Sandinista government in Managua? What did it do to us? What did it do to its own people? Was it the literacy campaign?

The health care and housing programs? The land reform and development of farm cooperatives? The attempt at rebuilding Managua, at increasing production or achieving a more equitable distribution of taxes, services, and food?

In large part, yes. Such reforms, even if not openly denounced by our government, do make a country suspect because they are symptomatic of an effort to erect a new and competing economic order in which the prerogatives of wealth and corporate investment are no longer secure, and the land, labor, and resources are no longer used primarily for the accumulation of corporate profits.

U.S. Ieaders and the corporate-owned press would have us believe they opposed revolutionary governments because the latter do not have an opposition press or have not thrown their country open to Western style (and Western-financed) elections. U.S. Ieaders come closer to their true complaint when they condemn such governments for interfering with the prerogatives of the "free market."

Similarly, Henry Kissinger came close to the truth when he defended the fascist overthrow of the democratic government in Chile by noting that when obliged to choose between saving the economy or saving democracy, we must save the economy. Had Kissinger said, we must save the capitalist economy, it would have been the whole truth. For under Allende, the danger was not that the economy was collapsing (although the U.S. was doing its utmost to destabilize it); the real threat was that the economy was moving away from free-market capitalism and toward a more equitable social democracy, albeit in limited ways.

U.S. officials say they are for change just as long as it is peaceful and not violently imposed. Indeed, economic elites may some times tolerate very limited reforms, learning to give a little in order to keep a lot. But judging from Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and a number of other places, they have a low tolerance for changes, even peaceful ones, that tamper with the existing class structure and threaten the prerogatives of corporate and landed wealth.

To the rich and powerful it makes little difference if their interests are undone by a peaceful transformation rather than a violent upheaval. The means concern them much less than the end results. It is not the "violent" in violent revolution they hate; it is the "revolution." (Third World elites seldom perish in revolutions. The worst of them usually manage to make it to Miami, Madrid, Paris, or New York.)

They dread socialism the way the rest of us might dread poverty and hunger. So, when push comes to shove, the wealthy classes of Third World countries, with a great deal of help from the corporate-military-political elites in our country, will use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming they are saving democracy from communism.

A socialist Cuba or a socialist North Korea, as such, are not a threat to the survival of world capitalism. The danger is not socialism in any one country but a socialism that might spread to many countries. Multinational corporations, as their name implies, need the entire world, or a very large part of it, to exploit and to invest and expand in. There can be no such thing as "capitalism in one country."

The domino theory-the view that if one country falls to the revolutionaries, others will follow in quick succession-may not work as automatically as its more fearful proponents claim, but there usually is a contagion, a power of example and inspiration, and sometimes even direct encouragement and assistance from one revolution to another.

Support the Good Guys?

If revolutions arise from the sincere aspirations of the populace, then it is time the United States identify itself with these aspi rations, so liberal critics keep urging. They ask: "Why do we always find ourselves on the wrong side in the Third World? Why are we always on the side of the oppressor?"

Too bad the question is treated as a rhetorical one, for it is deserving of a response. The answer is that right-wing oppressors, however heinous they be, do not tamper with, and give full support to, private investment and profit, while the leftists pose a challenge to that system.

There are those who used to say that we had to learn from the communists, copy their techniques, and thus win the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. Can we imagine the ruling interests of the United States abiding by this? The goal is not to copy communist reforms but to prevent them.

How would U.S. interventionists try to learn from and outdo the revolutionaries? Drive out the latifundio owners and sweatshop bosses? Kick out the plundering corporations and nationalize their holdings? Imprison the militarists and torturers? Redistribute the land, use capital investment for home consumption or hard currency exchange instead of cash crop exports that profit a rich few?

Install a national health insurance program and construct hospitals and clinics at public expense? Mobilize the population for literacy campaigns and for work in publicly owned enterprises? If U.S. rulers did all this, they would have done more than defeat the communists and other revolutionaries, they would have carried out the communists' programs. They would have prevented revolution only by bringing about its effects-thereby defeating their own goals.

U.S. policy makers say they cannot afford to pick and choose the governments they support, but that is exactly what they do. And the pattern of choice is consistent through each successive administration regardless of the party or personality in office. U.S. Ieaders support those governments, be they autocratic or democratic in form, that are friendly toward capitalism and oppose those governments, be they autocratic or democratic, that seek to develop a noncapitalist social order.

Occasionally friendly relations are cultivated with noncapitalist nations like China if these countries show themselves in useful opposition to other socialist nations and are sufficiently open to private capital exploitation. In the case of China, the economic opportunity is so huge as to be hard to resist, the labor supply is plentiful and cheap, and the profit opportunities are great.

In any one instance, interventionist policies may be less concerned with specific investments than with protecting the global investment system. The United States had relatively little direct investment in Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada-to mention three countries that Washington has invaded in recent years.

What was at stake in Grenada, as Reagan said, was something more than nutmeg. It was whether we would let a country develop a competing economic order, a different way of utilizing its land, labor, capital, and natural resources. A social revolution in any part of the world may or may not hurt specific U.S. corporations, but it nevertheless becomes part of a cumulative threat to private finance capital in general.

The United States will support governments that seek to suppress guerrilla movements, as in El Salvador, and will support guerrilla movements that seek to overthrow governments, as in Nicaragua. But there is no confusion or stupidity about it. It is incorrect to say, "We have no foreign policy" or "We have a stupid and confused foreign policy."

Again, it is necessary not to confuse subterfuge with stupidity. The policy is remarkably rational. Its central organizing principle is to make the world safe for the multinational corporations and the free-market capital-accumulation system. However, our rulers cannot ask the U.S. public to sacrifice their tax dollars and the lives of their sons for Exxon and Chase Manhattan, for the profit system as such, so they tell us that the interventions are for freedom and national security and the protection of unspecified "U.S. interests."

Whether policy makers believe their own arguments is not the key question. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton were doing their hypocritical best when their voices quavered with staged compassion for this or that oppressed people who had to be rescued from the communists or terrorists with U.S. missiles and troops, and sometimes they were sincere, as when they spoke of their fear and loathing of communism and revolution and their desire to protect U.S. investments abroad.

We need not ponder the question of whether our leaders are motivated by their class interests or by a commitment to anti-communist ideology, as if these two things were in competition with each other instead of mutually reinforcing. The arguments our leaders proffer may be self-serving and fabricated, yet also sincerely embraced. It is a creed's congruity with one's material self-interest that often makes it so compelling.

In any case, so much of politics is the rational use of irrational symbols. The arguments in support of interventionism may sound and may actually be irrational and nonsensical, but they serve a rational purpose.

Once we grasp the central consistency of U.S. foreign policy, we can move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis, from criticizing the "foolishness" of our government's behavior to understanding why the "foolishness" is not random but persists over time against all contrary arguments and evidence, always moving in the same elitist, repressive direction.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist governments, U.S. Ieaders now have a freer hand in their interventions. A number of left reformist governments that had relied on the Soviets for economic assistance and political protection against U.S. interference now have nowhere to turn. The willingness of U.S. Ieaders to tolerate economic deviations does not grow with their sense of their growing power.

Quite the contrary. Now even the palest economic nationalism, as displayed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein over oil prices, invites the destructive might of the U.S. military. The goal now, as always, is to obliterate every trace of an alternative system, to make it clear that there is no road to take except that of the free market, in a world in which the many at home and abroad will work still harder for less so that the favored few will accumulate more and more wealth.

That is the vision of the future to which most U.S. Ieaders are implicitly dedicated. It is a vision taken from the past and never forgotten by them, a matter of putting the masses of people at home and abroad back in their place, divested of any aspirations for a better world because they are struggling too hard to survive in this one.

Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

Dirty Truths is an eye-opening and entertaining collection of essays that investigate media and culture, consipiracy and state power, ideology and political consciousness. Parenti ranges over crucial issues of the day: free speech, the rise of neofascism, the coming ecological apocalypse, the relationship between wealth and poverty, the “terrorism” hype, the continuing mystifications about the Kennedy assassination, and the deceptions and injustices of U.S. corporate global domination. Moving from the political to the personal, Parenti shows the links between seemingly disparate social and political forces. Dirty Truths also contains three poems and moving accounts of his own ethnic family life and the political intolerance he encountered in academia. This book is a rich buffet, an enlightening and provocative feast for the mind and heart.

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Eric Margolis: Afghanistan: A Real Pullout or a Shell Game?

2011-06-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan: A Real Pullout or a Shell Game?

by Eric Margolis article link article link

June 26, 2011 | CommonDreams | Eric Margolis

Far-called our navies melt away

On dune and headland sinks the fire

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

--Rudyard Kipling “Recessional”

NEW YORK - War is waged to achieve political objectives, not to kill enemies. In this sense, the United States has lost the ten-year Afghan conflict, its longest war. Afghanistan remains the “graveyard of empires.”

The US has failed to install an obedient regime in Kabul that controls Afghanistan. It has made foes of the Pashtun majority, and, in pursuing this war, gravely undermined Pakistan. Claims that US forces were in Afghanistan to hunt the late Osama bin Laden were widely disbelieved.

Last Wednesday, President Barack Obama bowed to public opinion, approaching elections, military reality and financial woes by announcing he would withdraw a third of the 100,000 US troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer. Pentagon brass growled open opposition.

US allies France and Germany announced similar troops reductions. All foreign troops are supposed to quit Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Washington currently spends at least $10 billion monthly on the Afghan war, not counting “black” payments, CIA and NSA operations. The US has poured $18.8 billion in development aid into Afghanistan since 2001 with nothing to show for the effort. Pakistan has been given $20 billion to support the Afghan War.

The US deficit is heading over $1.4 trillion. The national debt, when unfunded pensions and benefits are added, is likely $100 trillion, according to the chief of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond trader.

Forty-four million Americans now receive food stamps; the national infrastructure of roads, airports, bridges and schools is crumbling from neglect. Unemployment, officially at 9.5%, is probably closer to 20%.

The cry is being heard: “Rebuild America, not Afghanistan.”

In spite of intense pro-war propaganda, over half of Americans now oppose the Afghan War. Even US-installed Afghan president Hamid Karzai calls it, “ineffective, apart from causing civilian casualties.”

So will the US really pull out of Afghanistan? That remains to be seen. There are contradictory signs.

Mid-level talks between the US and Taliban are under way. The US will probably keep some of its remaining 66,000 soldiers in Afghanistan after 2014, rebranding them training troops. The huge US bases at Kandahar and Bagram will be retained.

Billions more will be spent on the Afghan government army and police. They have so far proved ineffective because most are composed of Tajik and Uzbek mercenaries who are hated and distrusted by the Pashtun.

A similar process is underway in Iraq where “withdrawal” means keeping renamed US combat brigades in Iraq, thousands of mercenaries, and US combat forces in neighboring Kuwait and the Gulf. New US embassies in Baghdad and Kabul– huge, fortified complexes with their own mercenary combat forces– will be the world’s biggest. Kabul will have a staff of 1,000 US personnel. Bin Laden called them “crusader fortresses.”

In addition, the US will still arm and finance allied Tajik and Uzbek militias in Afghanistan. Financing Pakistan’s US-backed regime and Uzbekistan must also continue at around $3 billion yearly.

The US appears to be going and staying at the same time. By contrast, Taliban’s position is clear and simple: it will continue fighting until all foreign troops are withdrawn. US special forces, drones and hit squads have been unable to assassinate enough Taliban commanders to make the mujahidin stop fighting.

Americans never study history, not even their own. They don’t recall founding father, the great Benjamin Franklin, who said, “there is no good war, and no bad peace.” Or that the Pashtun Taliban and its allies are fierce, dedicated, undefeated warriors. I’ve been in combat with them and remain in awe of their courage and love of combat. The Pashtun mujahidin will keep fighting as always, as long as their ammunition lasts.

America, for all its B-1 heavy bombers, strike fighters, missiles, helicopter gunships and drones, armor, super electronics, spies in the sky and all the other high tech weapons of modern war has failed to defeat some 30,000 tribal fighters with nothing more than small arms and legendary valor.

The US has lost the all important military initiative in Afghanistan. It may linger there, but it cannot win.

Columnist and author Eric Margolis is a veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.

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interview Eric Margolis program link (mp3)

June 23, 2011 | AntiWar Radio

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Institutionalized Mammon Is What We Have Become

2011-06-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

Institutionalized Mammon Is What We Have Become

The corporate creed is greed, greed in the guise of National Interest, National Security [profit warriors]; "refugee" and "immigrant" are economic designations [money classifications; evil prejudice] - Isa 28:9 "Whom shall He teach knowledge? and whom shall He make to understand doctrine? [them that are] weaned from the milk, [and] drawn from the breasts ..."; we must remove ourselves from our carnal "mother" [COG (Church of God) Inc., harlots, false prophets] and the corporate [COG (Continuity of Government), Beast]; our minds have been pulled down into "media" confusion, the polluted discourse of Mammon - politics is the "business" of government [corporate pimps; private trust] not stewardship government [public trust] - our attempt to fight iniquity while maintaining the excess is a contradiction !! - as long as Mammon's life-blood [its money] keeps us alive, we are part of its body, its being !! - institutionalized Mammon is what we have become: it is "the" dominant force in our world [kosmos]; it is the worship [form; veneration (psychology)], weaponization, and power of evil; corporatized money as primary consideration/arbiter !!

Our Very Being Must Be Called Into Question

The Bible is the "Christ Document", the definitive "Word" [the Christ re-definition: signature of love = God's verification]; the COG Inc.'s semantics of confusion vs. God's Wisdom from Above [the straight and narrow (narrowing the field, the focus; still waters, not a raging sea foaming out its shame); God's love = our Being, God's wisdom = our Doing (application of the love)] -- God is relational, the God Family is relationship(s), and God's Holy Bible is "content relationships" *together* being a "single logical document", the representative Word of God [many parts and writers, working together] !! - God's "signature of love" is His servants "key of trust", His query method is also love and humility - the collective mind of humanity will become as "one" together with God, as His Family: AGAPE MIND, no longer imprisoned by our fears, and our selfish thoughts in response !!

Any evocation is a resultant, is dependent upon our approach !! - while the various NGO's and "resistance" groups express the [physical] immune system [reaction] of the Social Body, we, as radical Christians, must express the conscience [spiritual], God's very consciousness: OUR VERY BEING [and Doing] MUST BE CALLED INTO QUESTION, A DEEP, PENETRATING EXAMINATION, BY MERCY AND TRUTH !! - we must understand who we are and what we have become, and ask repentance of God: we must ask for His forgiveness, and we must forgive each other [we are *all* complicit]; WE MUST *REPAIR* THE BREACH AND *RESTORE* THE PATHS TO DWELL IN, *IN* LOVE !! - every man and every woman has a [sacred] voice that must be heard, his or her story; an independent media vs. the corporate voice, the voice of Mammon; God speaks to every one of us individually, we should follow His example [the signature of God and His truth is agape love] !!

Mammon or Messiah meta article link

Mammon or Messiah Appendix 1 web page (widescreen)

A "Society of the Gift"

2011-06-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

Chris Marsden: Wealth Of World's Richest Rose Nearly 10 Percent In 2010

2011-06-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

Wealth Of World’s Richest Rose Nearly 10 Percent In 2010

by Chris Marsden article link article link

June 25, 2011 | Countercurrents | WSWS

Austerity measures, wage cuts and rising unemployment have characterised the years since the crash of 2008 for working people. For the rich and super-rich, however, they have been the occasion for clawing back every penny of the initial losses made and adding a great deal more.

Today, the world’s wealthy are richer than before the crash and the number of individuals belonging to this highly exclusive club has grown.

The annual world wealth report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini identifies nearly 11 million “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs), defined as having more than $1 million in free cash, not including property and pensions. Their collective wealth reached $42.7 trillion in 2010, a 9.7 percent rise. This means that the wealth of this social layer has already surpassed the previous peak of $40.7 trillion reached in 2007.

The number of individuals worldwide who fall into this category grew 8.3 percent in 2010. This is described as a return to a “more sustainable pace,” following the 17 percent growth in the number of HNWIs to 10 million recorded in last year’s report.

To make clear the scale of individual wealth accumulation these figures represent, one needs to factor in the results for what are termed “ultra-high net worth individuals,” defined as having at least $30 million in free cash. The numbers in this group rose by 10 percent, to just 103,000. But their assets rose by 11.5 percent, giving then control of $15 trillion. That means that the top one percent of the world’s rich controls fully 36 percent of their collective assets.

The largest number of HNWIs continue to reside in the United States, followed by Japan and Germany. These countries together account for 53 percent of the world’s rich. The US has 3.1 million HNWIs, Japan 1.7 million and Germany 920,000.

The wealth of the richest 3.4 million people in North America, overwhelmingly in the US, rose by 9 percent to $11.6 trillion. The US is home to 28.6 percent of the world’s richest people.

Europe’s HNWIs fared less well generally. Nevertheless, the UK still sits at fourth in the league table, with France coming in fifth. Europe’s 3.1 million HNWIs have $10.2 trillion in free cash.

The far better performance of the HNWIs in the Asia-Pacific region has caused consternation among ruling elites in Europe and North America. The number of HNWIs in the Asia-Pacific region rose by almost 10 percent to 3.3 million in 2010. This was the largest regional growth rate, and the number of HNWIs in the Asia-Pacific region surpassed the European total as well as that of the US. It was only 100,000 lower than the total for the whole of North America. This elite layer in Asia now controls a total of $10.8 trillion in free cash.

Leading this growth in opulence are China and India. The number of mainland Chinese HNWI millionaires grew by fully 12 percent to 534,500 people, to which must be added the extraordinary growth of the wealthy elite in Hong Kong. The number of HNWIs there grew by 33.3 percent to 101,300, compared with 76,000 in 2009.

India, for its part, saw a 20.8 percent rise to 153,000 in the number of HNWIs, the highest rate of growth of any country. India for the first time placed in the top 12 in terms of the number of HNWI millionaires.

The Hindustan Times commented tellingly, “India may still have a long way to go in eliminating poverty, but high economic growth is throwing up millionaires by the thousands… The country, ranked 138th on the basis of per capita income by the IMF and 119th in the UN’s human development rankings based on indicators such as life expectancy and education, added in 2010 as many as 26,300 HNWIs…”

In the Middle East, the absolute numbers are smaller, but this only serves to underscore the scale of personal accumulation by that region’s rich. Just 400,000 people in the region control $1.7 trillion in free cash. The number of HNWIs in Kuwait and Bahrain rose by a quarter, putting these countries sixth and seventh in the table of 71 countries.

Tamer Rashad, head of Middle East operations at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, noted in Arabian Business that one aspect of the vast accumulation of wealth by the super-rich was “the significantly high ratio of savings to gross domestic product.” This ratio has reached 54 percent in Bahrain and 40 percent in Saudi Arabia, compared to the more usual single-digit rates in developed countries such as the US.

The extreme social polarisation hinted at in these figures is what ultimately gave rise to the mass movements that ended in the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and the mass protests throughout the region.

But the figures assembled by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, presented as a celebration of the good fortune of this financial elite, signal that a far broader worldwide eruption of the class struggle is being prepared.

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25 per day, and moderate poverty as living on less than $2 a day. In 2001, some 1.1 billion people lived on less than $1 a day and 2.7 billion on less than $2 a day. Almost half of the world’s people—3 billion souls—live on less than $2.50 a day. One billion children—fully 50 percent of the world’s children—live in poverty. Six million children die of hunger every year, 17,000 every day.

The irrational and unconscionable squandering of wealth on a handful of parasites on the one hand, and the crushing burden of poverty, hunger and misery on billions of people on the other constitutes an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system.

Countercurrents home page

World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) home page

Sara Flounders: The Pentagon and Slave Labor in U.S. Prisons

2011-06-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Pentagon and Slave Labor in U.S. Prisons

by Sara Flounders article link article link

June 23, 2011 | Global Research | International Action Center

Prisoners earning 23 cents an hour in U.S. federal prisons are manufacturing high-tech electronic components for Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles, launchers for TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, and other guided missile systems. A March article by journalist and financial researcher Justin Rohrlich of World in Review is worth a closer look at the full implications of this ominous development. (minyanville.com)

The expanding use of prison industries, which pay slave wages, as a way to increase profits for giant military corporations, is a frontal attack on the rights of all workers.

Prison labor — with no union protection, overtime pay, vacation days, pensions, benefits, health and safety protection, or Social Security withholding — also makes complex components for McDonnell Douglas/Boeing’s F-15 fighter aircraft, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, and Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter. Prison labor produces night-vision goggles, body armor, camouflage uniforms, radio and communication devices, and lighting systems and components for 30-mm to 300-mm battleship anti-aircraft guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder. Prisoners recycle toxic electronic equipment and overhaul military vehicles.

Labor in federal prisons is contracted out by UNICOR, previously known as Federal Prison Industries, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons. In 14 prison factories, more than 3,000 prisoners manufacture electronic equipment for land, sea and airborne communication. UNICOR is now the U.S. government’s 39th largest contractor, with 110 factories at 79 federal penitentiaries.

The majority of UNICOR’s products and services are on contract to orders from the Department of Defense. Giant multinational corporations purchase parts assembled at some of the lowest labor rates in the world, then resell the finished weapons components at the highest rates of profit. For example, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation subcontract components, then assemble and sell advanced weapons systems to the Pentagon.

Increased profits, unhealthy workplaces

However, the Pentagon is not the only buyer. U.S. corporations are the world’s largest arms dealers, while weapons and aircraft are the largest U.S. export. The U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and diplomats pressure NATO members and dependent countries around the world into multibillion-dollar weapons purchases that generate further corporate profits, often leaving many countries mired in enormous debt.

But the fact that the capitalist state has found yet another way to drastically undercut union workers’ wages and ensure still higher profits to military corporations — whose weapons wreak such havoc around the world — is an ominous development.

According to CNN Money, the U.S. highly skilled and well-paid “aerospace workforce has shrunk by 40 percent in the past 20 years. Like many other industries, the defense sector has been quietly outsourcing production (and jobs) to cheaper labor markets overseas.” (Feb. 24) It seems that with prison labor, these jobs are also being outsourced domestically.

Meanwhile, dividends and options to a handful of top stockholders and CEO compensation packages at top military corporations exceed the total payment of wages to the more than 23,000 imprisoned workers who produce UNICOR parts.

The prison work is often dangerous, toxic and unprotected. At FCC Victorville, a federal prison located at an old U.S. airbase, prisoners clean, overhaul and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat and coated in toxic spent ammunition, depleted uranium dust and chemicals.

A federal lawsuit by prisoners, food service workers and family members at FCI Marianna, a minimum security women’s prison in Florida, cited that toxic dust containing lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic poisoned those who worked at UNICOR’s computer and electronic recycling factory.

Prisoners there worked covered in dust, without safety equipment, protective gear, air filtration or masks. The suit explained that the toxic dust caused severe damage to nervous and reproductive systems, lung damage, bone disease, kidney failure, blood clots, cancers, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, memory lapses, skin lesions, and circulatory and respiratory problems. This is one of eight federal prison recycling facilities — employing 1,200 prisoners — run by UNICOR.

After years of complaints the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Federal Occupational Health Service concurred in October 2008 that UNICOR has jeopardized the lives and safety of untold numbers of prisoners and staff. (Prison Legal News, Feb. 17, 2009)

Racism & U.S. prisons

The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. imprisons more than 25 percent of all people imprisoned in the world.

There are more than 2.3 million prisoners in federal, state and local prisons in the U.S. Twice as many people are under probation and parole. Many tens of thousands of other prisoners include undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing and youthful offenders in categories considered reform or detention.

The racism that pervades every aspect of life in capitalist society — from jobs, income and housing to education and opportunity — is most brutally reflected by who is caught up in the U.S. prison system.

More than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are people of color. Seventy percent of those being sentenced under the three strikes law in California — which requires mandatory sentences of 25 years to life after three felony convictions — are people of color. Nationally, 39 percent of African-American men in their 20s are in prison, on probation or on parole. The U.S. imprisons more people than South Africa did under apartheid. (Linn Washington, “Incarceration Nation”)

The U.S. prison population is not only the largest in the world — it is relentlessly growing. The U.S. prison population is more than five times what it was 30 years ago.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, there were 400,000 prisoners in the U.S. Today the number exceeds 2.3 million. In California the prison population soared from 23,264 in 1980 to 170,000 in 2010. The Pennsylvania prison population climbed from 8,243 to 51,487 in those same years. There are now more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began, according to Law Professor Michelle Alexander in the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Today a staggering 1-in-100 adults in the U.S. are living behind bars. But this crime, which breaks families and destroys lives, is not evenly distributed. In major urban areas one-half of Black men have criminal records. This means life-long, legalized discrimination in student loans, financial assistance, access to public housing, mortgages, the right to vote and, of course, the possibility of being hired for a job.

State Prisons contracting slave labor

It is not only federal prisons that contract out prison labor to top corporations. State prisons that used forced prison labor in plantations, laundries and highway chain gangs increasingly seek to sell prison labor to corporations trolling the globe in search of the cheapest possible labor.

One agency asks: “Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the costs of employee benefits? Unhappy with out-of-state or offshore suppliers? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your workforce? Thinking about expansion space? Then Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you.” (educate-yourself.org, July 25, 2005)

Major corporations profiting from the slave labor of prisoners include Motorola, Compaq, Honeywell, Microsoft, Boeing, Revlon, Chevron, TWA, Victoria’s Secret and Eddie Bauer.

IBM, Texas Instruments and Dell get circuit boards made by Texas prisoners. Tennessee inmates sew jeans for Kmart and JCPenney. Tens of thousands of youth flipping hamburgers for minimum wages at McDonald’s wear uniforms sewn by prison workers, who are forced to work for much less.

In California, as in many states, prisoners who refuse to work are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges as well as “good time” credit, which slices hard time off their sentences.

Systematic abuse, beatings, prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, and lack of medical care make U.S. prison conditions among the worst in the world. Ironically, working under grueling conditions for pennies an hour is treated as a “perk” for good behavior.

In December, Georgia inmates went on strike and refused to leave their cells at six prisons for more than a week. In one of the largest prison protests in U.S. history, prisoners spoke of being forced to work seven days a week for no pay. Prisoners were beaten if they refused to work.

Private prisons for profit

In the ruthless search to maximize profits and grab hold of every possible source of income, almost every public agency and social service is being outsourced to private for-profit contractors.

In the U.S. military this means there are now more private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan than there are U.S. or NATO soldiers.

In cities and states across the U.S., hospitals, medical care facilities, schools, cafeterias, road maintenance, water supply services, sewage departments, sanitation, airports and tens of thousands of social programs that receive public funding are being contracted out to for-profit corporations. Anything publicly owned and paid for by generations of past workers’ taxes — from libraries to concert halls and parks — is being sold or leased at fire sale prices.

All this is motivated and lobbied for by right-wing think tanks like that set up by Koch Industries and their owners, Charles and David Koch, as a way to cut costs, lower wages and pensions, and undercut public service unions.

The most gruesome privatizations are the hundreds of for-profit prisons being established.

The inmate population in private for-profit prisons tripled between 1987 and 2007. By 2007 there were 264 such prison facilities, housing almost 99,000 adult prisoners. (house.leg.state.mn.us, Feb. 24, 2009) Companies operating such facilities include the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group Inc. and Community Education Centers.

Prison bonds provide a lucrative return for capitalist investors such as Merrill-Lynch, Shearson Lehman, American Express and Allstate. Prisoners are traded from one state to another based on the most profitable arrangements.

Militarism and prisons

Hand in hand with the military-industrial complex, U.S. imperialism has created a massive prison-industrial complex that generates billions of dollars annually for businesses and industries profiting from mass incarceration.

For decades workers in the U.S. have been assured that they also benefit from imperialist looting by the giant multinational corporations. But today more than half the federal budget is absorbed by the costs of maintaining the military machine and the corporations who are guaranteed profits for equipping the Pentagon. That is the only budget category in federal spending that is guaranteed to increase by at least 5 percent a year — at a time when every social program is being cut to the bone.

The sheer economic weight of militarism seeps into the fabric of society at every level. It fuels racism and reaction. The political influence of the Pentagon and the giant military and oil corporations — with their thousands of high-paid lobbyists, media pundits and network of links into every police force in the country — fuels growing repression and an expanding prison population.

The military, oil and banking conglomerates, interlinked with the police and prisons, have a stranglehold on the U.S. capitalist economy and reins of political power, regardless of who is president or what political party is in office. The very survival of these global corporations is based on immediate maximization of profits. They are driven to seize every resource and source of potential profits.

Thoroughly rational solutions are proposed whenever the human and economic cost of militarism and repression is discussed. The billions spent for war and fantastically destructive weapons systems could provide five to seven times more jobs if spent on desperately needed social services, education and rebuilding essential infrastructure. Or it could provide free university education, considering the fact that it costs far more to imprison people than to educate them.

Why aren’t such reasonable solutions ever chosen? Because military contracts generate far larger guaranteed profits to the military and the oil industries, which have a decisive influence on the U.S. economy.

The prison-industrial complex — including the prison system, prison labor, private prisons, police and repressive apparatus, and their continuing expansion — are a greater source of profit and are reinforced by the climate of racism and reaction. Most rational and socially useful solutions are not considered viable options.

Sara Flounders is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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John Pilger: Brainwashing the Corporate Way

2011-06-25T07:41:00.000-07:00

Brainwashing the Corporate Way

by John Pilger article link article link

June 24, 2011 | Global Research | John Pilger

One of the most original and provocative books of the past decade is Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt (Rowman & Littlefield). “A critical look at salaried professionals,” says the cover, “and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives.” Its theme is postmodern America but also applies to Britain, where the corporate state has bred a new class of Americanised manager to run the private and public sectors: the banks, the main parties, corporations, important committees, the BBC.

Professionals are said to be meritorious and non-ideological. Yet, in spite of their education, writes Schmidt, they think less independently than non-professionals. They use corporate jargon – “model”, “performance”, “targets”, “strategic oversight”. In Disciplined Minds, Schmidt argues that what makes the modern professional is not technical knowledge but “ideological discipline”. Those in higher education and the media do “political work” but in a way that is not seen as political. Listen to a senior BBC person sincerely describe the nirvana of neutrality to which he or she has risen. “Taking sides” is anathema; and yet the modern professional knows never to challenge the “built-in ideology of the status quo”. What matters is the "right attitude".

A key to training professionals is what Schmidt calls “assignable curiosity”. Children are naturally curious, but along the way to becoming a professional they learn that curiosity is a series of tasks assigned by others. On entering training, students are optimistic and idealistic. On leaving, they are “pressured and troubled” because they realise that “the primary goal for many is getting compensated sufficiently for sidelining their original goals”. I have met many young people, especially budding journalists, who would recognise themselves in this description. For no matter how indirect its effect, the primary influence of professional managers is the extreme political cult of money worship and inequality known as neoliberalism.

The ultimate professional manager is Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays Bank in London, who got a £6.5m bonus in March. More than 200 Barclays managers took home £554m in total last year. In January, Diamond told the Commons Treasury select committee that “the time for remorse is over”. He was referring to the £1trn of public money handed unconditionally to corrupted banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had described such “financiers” as his personal “inspiration”.

This was the final act of corporate coup d’état, now disguised by a specious debate about “cuts” and a “national deficit”. The most humane premises of British life are to be eliminated. The “value” of the cuts is said to be £83bn, almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by the banks and corporations. That the British public continues to give the banks an additional annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees – a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service – is suppressed.

So, too, is the absurdity of the very notion of “cuts”. When Britain was officially bankrupt following the Second World War, there was full employment and some of its greatest public institutions, such as the Health Service, were built. Yet “cuts” are managed by those who say they oppose them and manufacture consent for their wider acceptance. This is the role of the Labour Party’s professional managers.

In matters of war and peace, Schmidt’s disciplined minds promote violence, death and mayhem on a scale still unrecognised in Britain. In spite of damning evidence to the Chilcot inquiry by the former intelligence chief Major General Michael Laurie, the “core business” manager, Alastair Campbell, remains at large, as do all the other war managers who toiled with Blair and at the Foreign Office to justify and sell the beckoning bloodbath in Iraq.

The reputable media play a critical often subtle role. Frederick Ogilvie, who succeeded the BBC’s founder, Lord Reith, as director general, wrote that his goal was to turn the BBC into a “fully effective instrument of war”. Ogilvie would have been delighted with his 21st-century managers. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the BBC’s coverage overwhelmingly echoed the government’s mendacious position, as studies by the University of Wales and Media Tenor show.

However, the great Arab uprising cannot be easily managed, or appropriated, with omissions and caveats, as an exchange on the BBC’s Today programme on 16 May made clear. With his celebrated professionalism, honed in corporate speeches, John Humphrys interviewed a Palestinian spokesman, Husam Zomlot, following Israel’s massacre of unarmed demonstrators on the 63rd anniversary of the illegal expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homes.

Humphrys: . . . it’s not surprising that Israel reacted the way it did, is it?

Zomlot: . . . I am very proud and glad [they were] peacefully marching only to . . . really to draw attention to their 63-year plight.

Humphrys: But they did not march peacefully, that’s my point . . .

Zomlot: None of them . . . was armed . . . [They were] opposed to Israeli tanks and helicopters and F-16s. You cannot even start to compare the violence . . . This is not a security matter . . . [the Israelis] always fail to deal with such a purely political, humanitarian, legal matter . . .

Humphrys: Sorry to interrupt you there but . . . if I marched into your house waving a club and throwing a stone at you then it would be a security matter, wouldn’t it?

Zomlot: I beg your pardon. According to the United Nations Security Council resolutions, those people are marching to their homes; they have the deeds of their homes; it’s their private property. So let’s set the record right once and for all . . .

It was a rare moment. Setting the record straight is not a managerial “target”.

John Pilger is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Robert Parry: Afghan War: No Vietnam Redux

2011-06-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

Exclusive: Many on the American Left are furious with Barack Obama — and find nothing to praise in his gradual troop drawdown in Afghanistan. But the President’s speech may be seen, in retrospect, as an important turning point in U.S. war policy toward the Muslim world as well as a signal that the Afghan conflict will not follow the pattern of the Vietnam War with one incremental escalation after the next, Robert Parry reports.

Afghan War: No Vietnam Redux

by Robert Parry article link article link

June 24, 2011 | OpEdNews | Consortium News

Sometimes the American Left won’t recognize its own success. Despite disappointment over President Barack Obama’s overall handling of the Afghan War, his announcement that he is reversing the escalation and beginning a drawdown is a significant development suggesting that Afghanistan won’t become “another Vietnam” as the Left had feared.

Indeed, Obama’s speech Wednesday night could be compared to John F. Kennedy’s tentative moves at a similar point in his presidency to begin backing away from a major expansion of the Vietnam War, a process that was reversed only after Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963.

Clearly, Kennedy and Obama made initial foreign policy mistakes, largely due to their selection of advisers. Kennedy retained too much of the Republican military brass – the likes of Gen. Curtis LeMay – and brought in too many of his own “best and brightest” war hawks – such as the Bundy brothers.

Similarly, Obama surrounded himself with a mix of Republican holdovers from George W. Bush’s administration, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, and Democratic neocon-lites, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And, much as Kennedy bowed to his hawkish advisers when he approved the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba early in his presidency, Obama let himself be boxed in by Gates, Petraeus and Clinton in regards to a sizable escalation of the war in Afghanistan. For both presidents, this was part of the learning curve, but Kennedy and Obama seemed to have benefitted from the negative experience.

Kennedy figured out ways to maneuver around the hawks during the dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and appeared headed toward a pullout of U.S. advisers assigned to Vietnam before his fateful trip to Dallas in 1963.

For his part, Obama has eased Gates into retirement, replacing him at the Pentagon with CIA Director Leon Panetta, who has quietly emerged as a key foreign policy adviser to Obama and who has pushed for a more limited (or precise) use of military power, a strategy that Obama embraced in his speech on Wednesday.

“When threatened we must respond with force,” Obama said. “But when that force can be targeted, we need not deploy large armies overseas.”

This doctrinal shift by Obama – a not-so-subtle slap at George W. Bush and the neocons – also represented a victory for Vice President Joe Biden, who had opposed the Afghan “surge” in 2009, favoring a narrower counterterrorism strategy over the counterinsurgency approach sought by Gates, Petraeus and Clinton.

Indeed, the key losers on Wednesday were that same trio – Gates, Petraeus and Clinton – who favored only a token withdrawal of 5,000 troops now and the retention of the nearly full “surge” force in Afghanistan through the entire fighting season of 2012.

Instead, Obama is ordering the withdrawal of 10,000 troops this year and the rest of the 30,000 or so “surge” troops by next summer.

Neocon Angst

The capital’s still-influential neoconservatives howled at this decision, with their flagship newspaper, The Washington Post, accusing Obama of strategic incoherence.

“The president risks undermining not only the war on the ground but also the efforts to draw elements of the Taliban into a political settlement,” the Post stated in its lead editorial, entitled “End of a Surge.” Reflecting elite neocon opinion, the Post’s editors favored maintaining the “surge” force through the fall of 2012 so it could “sweep eastern provinces” of Afghanistan.

Sources with insight into Obama’s thinking also suggest that Clinton’s influence is on the wane, partly because she pressed for a deeper U.S. military commitment in Libya than Obama wanted.

Clinton and some European allies succeeded in forcing the President’s hand regarding the initial intervention to stop a feared mass killing of Libyans opposed to dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But a bloody stalemate has followed after the same grouping blocked any negotiations with Gaddafi and Obama balked at making a major military commitment to the oust-Gaddafi campaign.

One of the key harmful results of the Libyan conflict has been the cutoff of easily refined Libyan crude, contributing to a spike in oil prices. That, in turn, drove American gasoline to more than $4 a gallon, dealing a blow to the fragile economic recovery and worsening Obama’s reelection prospects.

On Thursday, the Obama administration’s release of 30 million gallons of oil from U.S. emergency reserves was meant to bring global supplies roughly in line with what they were before the cutoff of Libyan oil. If the Libyan crisis had not arisen or had been resolved peacefully, the impact of higher oil prices might not have been so adverse.

Thus, Clinton’s neocon-lite enthusiasm for “regime change” in Libya is regarded as a factor in weighing down the U.S. economy and dimming Obama’s reelection hopes. That has further alienated Clinton from Obama’s inner circle which had hoped to be showcasing the prospect of the Arab Spring bringing non-violent political change to the region.

With Gates leaving and Clinton on the outs, the third member of the trio, neocon-favorite Gen. Petraeus, has been tapped to replace Panetta at CIA. However, there is talk about Petraeus taking much of the summer off to recuperate from his difficult tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Petraeus does get to CIA – assuming there are no change in plans – he will have a prestigious job but one whose influence depends on access to the president. As a relative outsider, Petraeus is not considered likely to have the clout that Panetta achieved.

So, Obama’s Afghan War speech and the events that have surrounded it suggest a decline in neocon influence inside the U.S. government, which the anti-imperialists on the Left (and the Right) might be expected to welcome.

Vanity of Perfectionism

However, for many on the American Left, Obama’s gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan and his continued pullout from Iraq have amounted to too little too late. Some leftists now regard Obama as the enemy and have essentially embraced the mantra of Ralph Nader’s Green Party campaign in 2000, that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republicans and the Democrats.

Though I have encountered many practical people on the Left who understand the difficult realities of modern-day American politics – especially the structural imbalance between a powerful and well-funded Right and a weak Left – I also have met a number of leftists who display what might be called the vanity of perfectionism.

For them, staking out the perfect intellectual position is more important than achieving social reforms that might help society or adopting a practical foreign policy that could save lives.

These folks really don’t see any meaningful difference between, say, Al Gore and George W. Bush, even though a Gore presidency last decade would have surely made the battle against climate change a high priority while Bush ignored the problem and helped build a right-wing political movement that continues to deny the science of global warming.

That “perfectionist” brand of leftists also accepts no blame for anything that happened under Bush, even though Nader’s campaign hurt Gore nationally and kept the margin in the key state of Florida close enough for Bush to steal it.

It now appears that a parallel dynamic is taking shape for Election 2012, with these same elements of the Left determined to deny Obama a second term, almost as much as the Republicans are.

In Obama’s case, where more sympathetic observers might see a liberal-minded politician trying to maneuver through the Washington mine field toward a more peaceful world, his critics on the Left see a committed imperialist who is just as much a warmonger as Bush ever was, if not worse.

Therefore, it’s not likely that Obama’s nuanced shifts toward disengagement in Afghanistan, along with his ongoing pullout from Iraq, will earn Obama much credit.

While the Left may view Kennedy more charitably in retrospect because of evidence that he was turning away from the Vietnam War, there is far less sympathy for Obama despite a similar pattern in his presidency.

Yet, Obama, like Kennedy, seems to have learned from some early mistakes and is now trying to tack the ship of state, against some strong winds, toward a more peaceful harbor.

Whether the President can accomplish this course correction – despite gusts from Washington’s still powerful neocons – remains to be seen. He also faces strong economic headwinds that could doom his reelection, and he can expect only spotty backing from U.S. progressives.

So, it is possible that Obama’s reversal on the Afghan War escalation might be reversed again, if a Republican replaces him in 2013 and restores the neocons to their prior dominant position in directing U.S. foreign policy.

Whatever a Republican presidential candidate may say now, the fact is that the neocons remain a key force inside the GOP’s foreign policy establishment, as witnessed by the failure of Rep. Paul Ryan’s austerity budget to make any significant cuts in military spending.

But today there is reason for optimism among the many Americans who have lamented the near-decade-long U.S. war in Afghanistan (and the broader conflict in the Muslim world). The trend is finally away from escalation, away from Vietnam Redux, and toward a possible (if imperfect) peace.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

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Linh Dinh: Sentimental Mass Murderer

2011-06-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

Sentimental Mass Murderer

by Linh Dinh article link article link

June 23, 2011 | CommonDreams | OpEdNews

When Obama came into power, there were roughly 35,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Within two years, he tripled that number. Now, Obama announces that 10,000 soldiers will come home by the end of 2011, and 33,000 by the end of next summer. He surges twice, pulls back once, and declares it a successful withdrawal, as promised. I’m sure glad Obama’s not my accountant, or both of us would be arrested for fraud, but wait a sec, Obama is my accountant, and my banker, and my president.

And why are we in Afghanistan? Officially, we are there to fight the Taliban, whom we propped up in the first place. Democratic Jimmy Carter and Republican Ronald Reagan armed, financed and trained these freedom fighters or Islamofascists. In the 1980’s, America poured gasoline onto the flames of Islamic fanaticism to burn down the Soviets. Now, we are the Soviets.

America goes into Iraq and Afghanistan, turns these countries upside down, then explains that it would be irresponsible to leave them topsy-turvy, but as long as America stays there, these countries will remain messed up. America causes bombs to explode, then insists that it has to stay put until these bombs stop exploding, but America is the bomb! Time and time again, America has set the fire, then shows up as a volunteer firefighter. Such is the burden of being a world leader in freedom, democracy and weapon sales.

America, you are a sentimental mass murderer. You wage war after war, then pretend to mourn for some of the victims. (The “us” victims, not the “them” victims.) As Barack sends America’s sons and daughters into these needless carnages, Michelle urges us to value their pointless sacrifices.

While our grunts perform their imperial overstretch duties overseas, their loved ones struggle back home, so Michelle wants us offer these families comfort and assistance, “It can be helping a neighbor mow their lawn. People can volunteer to babysit for an afternoon, cook a meal, offer to fix a heater, or reach out to a reserve family living away from the support of a military installation.” Of course, these hardships could be avoided if we would only stop sending our gung ho fodders all over to kill and maim, and sometimes be wiped out in turns.

As the husband kills, the wife comforts, but often, this janus trick is performed by the selfsame joker. It has become an annual rite for Colin Powell to give a solemn speech on the Capitol lawn on Memorial Day. This year, he again paid tribute to Americans “fighting the global war against terrorism, serving and sacrificing in Afghanistan and Iraq and at other outposts on the front lines of freedom. The life of each and every one of them is precious to their loved ones and to our nation. And each life given in the name of liberty is a life that has not been lost in vain.”

Though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction, Powell can claim, even now and with a straight face, that it is a front line of the war against terrorism. Done with his unctuous and hypocritical verbiage, Powell went into the crowd to hug a dozen vets and their loved ones. He patted the baby of a brain-damaged and blind man. Why no one, but no one, stood up and shouted, “Hey, Powell, wasn’t it you who helped to lie us into war? Didn’t you stand in front of the whole world and pointed to bogus satellite photos of ‘mobile laboratories for making biological weapons’?” In contemporary America, an architect of war can play at consoling its victims, and no one will bat an eye.

We are also led to believe that the people we bomb, shoot and rape are our beneficiaries. According to Yahoo! News, the withdrawal of American troops brings “a mix of joy and concern [among Afghans] as the nation struggles with the idea of less assistance,” so to invade a country is to assist it, but such is the logics of empire. Next time someone shoots you, know that you’re being assisted.

The empire is going broke, however, so our victims should voluntarily send us loads of cash. Visiting Baghdad, congressman Rohrabacher (CA) declared, "Once Iraq becomes a very rich and prosperous country... we would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the mega-dollars that we have spent here in the last eight years. We were hoping that there would be a consideration of a payback because the United States right now is in close to a very serious economic crisis and we could certainly use some people to care about our situation as we have cared about theirs." Bombed by Obama, Libyans should feel a similar gratitude, "If the Libyans for example are willing to help pay, compensate the United States, for what we would spend in helping them through this rough period, that's one way to do it."

With one hand, Uncle Sam will shoot you. With the other, he’ll jiggle the tin cup. Give it up already, all you bloody ingrates! America’s in deep, deep trouble. With our media the way they are, our leaders will continue speak nonsense and there’s nothing we can do about it.

America needs an urgent triage, but none is forthcoming. As she decays, festers and convulses, our next president is asked, “Deep dish or thin crust? American Idol or Dancing with the Stars?”

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

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Reflections on Troop Withdrawal in Afghanistan

by H. Patricia Hynes article link

June 23, 2011 | CommonDreams

Obama's 10,000 Troop Spit In The Ocean-- Not Even Close to Good Enough

by Rob Kall article link

June 23, 2011 | OpEdNews

In Afghanistan Speech, Obama Offers Token Troop Withdrawals While Maintaining the "War on Terror” Mindset

by Phyllis Bennis article link

June 22, 2011 | AlterNet

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Nine War Words That Define Our World

by Tom Engelhardt article link article link

June 23, 2011 | CommonDreams | TomDispatch

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The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies

interview Noam Chomsky article link

June 22, 2011 | ICH

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Imperialism 101

Chapter 1 of Against Empire

by Michael Parenti article link

June 22, 2011 | ICH

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Afghan War Down, Freedom Up?

by Staff Report article link

June 23, 2011 | The Daily Bell

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Bad News for a Country Tired of War

by Bill Boyarsky article link

June 23, 2011 | Truthdig

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Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

2011-06-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

Environmental Leaders Call for Civil Disobedience to Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline

by Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry, Maude Barlow, Bill McKibben and Others article link

June 23, 2011 | CommonDreams

Dear Friends,

This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the internet age—it’s serious stuff.

The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.

The full version goes like this:

As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.

And as you also know, our democracy is increasingly controlled by special interests interested only in their short-term profit.

These two trends collide this summer in Washington, where the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth. These corporations want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas refineries.

To call this project a horror is serious understatement. The tar sands have wrecked huge parts of Alberta, disrupting ways of life in indigenous communities—First Nations communities in Canada, and tribes along the pipeline route in the U.S. have demanded the destruction cease. The pipeline crosses crucial areas like the Oglalla Aquifer where a spill would be disastrous—and though the pipeline companies insist they are using ‘state of the art’ technologies that should leak only once every 7 years, the precursor pipeline and its pumping stations have leaked a dozen times in the past year. These local impacts alone would be cause enough to block such a plan. But the Keystone Pipeline would also be a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous.

How much carbon lies in the recoverable tar sands of Alberta? A recent calculation from some of our foremost scientists puts the figure at about 200 parts per million. Even with the new pipeline they won’t be able to burn that much overnight—but each development like this makes it easier to get more oil out. As the climatologist Jim Hansen (one of the signatories to this letter) explained, if we have any chance of getting back to a stable climate “the principal requirement is that coal emissions must be phased out by 2030 and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands, must be left in the ground.” In other words, he added, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.” The Keystone pipeline is an essential part of the game. "Unless we get increased market access, like with Keystone XL, we're going to be stuck," said Ralph Glass, an economist and vice-president at AJM Petroleum Consultants in Calgary, told a Canadian newspaper last week.

Given all that, you’d suspect that there’s no way the Obama administration would ever permit this pipeline. But in the last few months the president has signed pieces of paper opening much of Alaska to oil drilling, and permitting coal-mining on federal land in Wyoming that will produce as much CO2 as 300 power plants operating at full bore.

And Secretary of State Clinton has already said she’s ‘inclined’ to recommend the pipeline go forward. Partly it’s because of the political commotion over high gas prices, though more tar sands oil would do nothing to change that picture. But it’s also because of intense pressure from industry. TransCanada Pipeline, the company behind Keystone, has hired as its chief lobbyist for the project a man named Paul Elliott, who served as deputy national director of Clinton’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce—a bigger funder of political campaigns than the RNC and DNC combined—has demanded that the administration “move quickly to approve the Keystone XL pipeline,” which is not so surprising—they’ve also told the U.S. EPA that if the planet warms that will be okay because humans can ‘adapt their physiology’ to cope. The Koch Brothers, needless to say, are also backing the plan, and may reap huge profits from it.

So we’re pretty sure that without serious pressure the Keystone Pipeline will get its permit from Washington. A wonderful coalition of environmental groups has built a strong campaign across the continent—from Cree and Dene indigenous leaders to Nebraska farmers, they’ve spoken out strongly against the destruction of their land. We need to join them, and to say even if our own homes won’t be crossed by this pipeline, our joint home—the earth—will be wrecked by the carbon that pours down it.

And we need to say something else, too: it’s time to stop letting corporate power make the most important decisions our planet faces.

We don’t have the money to compete with those corporations, but we do have our bodies, and beginning in mid August many of us will use them. We will, each day through Labor Day, march on the White House, risking arrest with our trespass. We will do it in dignified fashion, demonstrating that in this case we are the conservatives, and that our foes—who would change the composition of the atmosphere are dangerous radicals. Come dressed as if for a business meeting—this is, in fact, serious business. And another sartorial tip—if you wore an Obama button during the 2008 campaign, why not wear it again? We very much still want to believe in the promise of that young Senator who told us that with his election the ‘rise of the oceans would begin to slow and the planet start to heal.’ We don’t understand what combination of bureaucratic obstinacy and insider dealing has derailed those efforts, but we remember his request that his supporters continue on after the election to pressure the government for change. We’ll do what we can.

And one more thing: we don’t want college kids to be the only cannon fodder in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change—10,000 came to DC for the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest. Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere (and whose careers won’t be as damaged by an arrest record) to step up too. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders. One thing we don’t want is a smash up: if you can’t control your passions, this action is not for you.

This won’t be a one-shot day of action. We plan for it to continue for several weeks, to the date in September when by law the administration can either grant or deny the permit for the pipeline. Not all of us can actually get arrested—half the signatories to this letter live in Canada, and might well find our entry into the U.S. barred. But we will be making plans for sympathy demonstrations outside Canadian consulates in the U.S., and U.S. consulates in Canada—the decision-makers need to know they’re being watched.

Winning this battle won’t save the climate. But losing it will mean the chances of runaway climate change go way up—that we’ll endure an endless future of the floods and droughts we’ve seen this year. And we’re fighting for the political future too—for the premise that we should make decisions based on science and reason, not political connection. You have to start somewhere, and this is where we choose to begin.

If you think you might want to be a part of this action, we need you to sign up here. As plans solidify in the next few weeks we’ll be in touch with you to arrange nonviolence training; our colleagues at a variety of environmental and democracy campaigns will be coordinating the actual arrangements.

We know we’re asking a lot. You should think long and hard on it, and pray if you’re the praying type. But to us, it’s as much privilege as burden to get to join this fight in the most serious possible way. We hope you’ll join us.

Maude Barlow

Wendell Berry

Tom Goldtooth

Danny Glover

James Hansen

Wes Jackson

Naomi Klein

Bill McKibben

George Poitras

David Suzuki

Gus Speth

p.s.—Please pass this letter on to anyone else you think might be interested. We realize that what we’re asking isn’t easy, and we’re very grateful that you’re willing even to consider it.

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Eleanor J. Bader: Black Panther's Posthumous Writings Cover Activism's Risks, Rewards

2011-06-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

Black Panther's Posthumous Writings Cover Activism's Risks, Rewards

by Eleanor J. Bader article link

June 22, 2011 | Truthout | Book Review

"The War Before: The True Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison & Fighting for Those Left Behind" Safiya Bukhari Feminist Press New York, 2010

Everyone wants to leave a legacy, whether through procreation or by creating a tangible testament to their existence. For some, it's art, music, storytelling or writing. For others it's the founding of an organization or the creation of a product.

For Black Panther Safiya Bukhari, who died in 2003, the bequest included an ongoing community organization, the Jericho Movement to free US political prisoners; a daughter and grandchild; and an astute collection of essays written to encourage the always-uphill battle to win freedom and equality for the world's disenfranchised and impoverished people.

In "The War Before," a collection of 22 edited commentaries, Bukhari gives readers a sense of what it was like to be a Panther and captures the exhilaration of establishing free breakfast programs and health centers in low-income communities of color. She also explores Panther excesses, from rigid rules to over-the-top posturing and pontificating. At the same time, the anthology reminds would-be or burned-out activists of the sheer joy that comes from resisting civic wrongs.

It's an important, inspiring book.

That said, there are small lapses in which rhetoric dominates, and some topics - such as the split between East Coast and West Coast Panthers that was fomented by the US counterintelligence program, or Cointelpro - could have been more fully discussed.

Still, "The War Before" is a fascinating look at the making of an activist, and it captures the spirit of a tumultuous era in which thousands joined Bukhari in believing that a domestic insurrection was not just possible, but imminent.

Editor and former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn's introduction to the book gives readers a bit of the backstory. Among the tidbits presented are these: Bukhari - originally named Bernice Jones - was reared in the Bronx, one of ten children in a devoutly Christian, middle-class household. In college, she joined the Eta Alpha Mu sorority and, as part of her initiation, was required to travel to Harlem. There, she and several friends encountered a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) selling newspapers, and learned of the feeding program that had been established. "The women went to the church where the breakfasts were offered, to see for themselves," Whitehorn reports. "Safiya liked what she saw and kept coming back. It was at that time that she began to notice how badly the community was treated by the police."

By early 1969, Jones/Bukhari was hooked. She dropped out of school and began working in the Harlem BPP office, immersing herself in the study of political theory and learning to do community organizing. She also got involved with comrade Robert Webb and gave birth to a daughter. "In those years," Whitehorn writes, "revolutionaries usually saw ourselves as too busy making revolution to engage in standard family life."

As the year progressed, the demands on the cadre became more intense, and after BPP members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in December 1969 - killed by government agents hell-bent on destroying the BPP - many activists, including Bukhari, concluded that underground organizations were needed. Placing her daughter with her mother, Bukhari vanished. Whitehorn chronicles what happened next:

In December 1973, [Bukhari] was arrested and charged with plotting to break prisoners out of New York City jails.... The charges were soon dismissed. Then she was hit with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury that was preparing charges against other Black radicals. She couldn't bring herself to testify against her political associates. Safiya left her family and friends to continue her work underground. She stayed under for almost two years, until 1975, when she was arrested at the scene of a grocery store shooting in Norfolk, Virginia.

Bukhari was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 40 years. While imprisoned, her health began to deteriorate, but her requests for medical care were ignored. She somehow escaped from the prison in late 1976. Although she got the health care she needed while on the lam, she was eventually recaptured, and spent the next four years in solitary confinement. Finally, after eight years and eight months, she was granted parole and released in 1983.

Bukhari's attention subsequently turned to publicizing the existence of political prisoners here at home. She also worked to develop support networks for those locked inside. Her essays on this topic are searing.

So are her reflections on the BPP, written with the obvious benefit of hindsight. In "On The Question of Sexism Within the Black Panther Party," she places male chauvinism in a wider context. "The destruction of our culture, which started with the stealing of our language, religion, and children, was completed when we began to measure our own worth by how many women the Black man could pleasure at a time and how many children we could have," she writes. "Since Black men had been stripped of their manhood in every way but the ability to pleasure women and make babies, the sexual act soon became the standard by which the Black man measured his manhood. This is the root of the sexism that is plaguing our community."

This is not to say that Bukhari condoned sexist behavior. She didn't. Among the Party's Eight Points of Attention, she continues, was the injunction that men should not "take liberties with women." That this was part of the written mandate impressed Bukhari, and she notes that BPP women often worked "right alongside men, being assigned sections to organize just like the men, and receiving the same training as men." Nonetheless, she recognized that many male Panthers "brought their sexist attitudes into the organization." Worse, she was highly aware of the fact that they were rarely, if ever, ordered to change their ways.

While Bukhari did not consider herself a feminist, the presumption of male superiority rankled her, and she fought it at every turn. Then again, her standards for everyone - male and female - were extremely high, and when people failed to meet her expectations she sought to understand the psychological and material factors that made it difficult for them to do so.

In "We Too Are Veterans: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Black Panther Party," she lambastes the government repression that not only left many Panthers dead, but also led to psychic trauma in those who survived. "We had not just mouthed the words 'revolution in our lifetime,' but had believed them," she confesses. "We sincerely believed the Black Panther Party would lead us to victory." Instead, activists like Clark and Hampton, Timothy "Red" Adams, Fred Bennett, Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, John Huggins, Little Bobby Hutton, Twymon Myers, Sandra Pratt, Robert Webb, and Anthony "Kimu" White were murdered. This reality, in addition to "the constant shoot-outs, the infiltration and set-ups that left you leery of strangers or of anyone getting too close or acting too friendly," took a terrible toll on the BPP members left to bear witness, Bukhari concludes.

"As I looked over the list of PTSD symptoms, I recognized myself," she writes. "And the first step in resolving the problem is recognizing that it exists."

Indeed. To her credit, Bukhari refused to wallow in bitterness and chose to focus her energies on the self-help that comes from fighting back. As the founder of the Jericho Movement , a coalition of religious and secular groups working to win amnesty for US political prisoners, Bukhari worked tirelessly to plan rallies, protests and speaking tours before her untimely death.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's touching afterword posits Bukhari as someone who never lost sight of the big picture. She knew, he writes, that "it comes down to organizing. It comes down to the people."

The Bukhari that Abu-Jamal recalls knew that the movement was bigger than any one person, but still understood that one person could get the ball rolling and make an impact. Those who knew her, he adds, frequently commented that she was the hardest-working person they'd ever met.

"The War Before" will remind Bukhari's friends and family of what the planet lost when Safiya died eight years ago at age 53. Likewise, it is sure to stir those who are reading her words for the first time.

Safiya Bukhari, presente.

Eleanor J. Bader is a freelance writer, teacher and feminist activist from Brooklyn, New York. She writes for The Brooklyn Rail, ontheissuesmagazine.com, RHrealitycheck.org and other progressive blogs and publications.

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Safiya Bukhari Feminist Press New York, 2010