Luke/Marti Hiken: America in Crisis. What Now?

America in Crisis. What Now?

by Luke Hiken and Marti Hiken article link

November 13, 2010 | Progressive Avenues | Global Research

How do we deal with the demise of the two-party electoral system in the U.S.? With U.S./corporate wars occurring throughout the world, deficit and defense spending, a faltering economic system, increasing environmental catastrophes, and the shipping of jobs overseas, the task seems monumental. But, it isn’t. Changes can come. Changes will come. The question is: How do we take advantage of the changes taking place and how do we influence them for the good of all the people?

First, what are we facing?

1) The wealth of the nation has been consolidated into the hands of a clique of corporate executives that dominate both political parties and determine who the American people will “elect.” These corporations, described by many authors as “The Oligarchs,” are run and owned by CEOs in the following industries: oil; insurance; pharmaceuticals; agri-business; Wall Street and the banking industry, and the military/security complex. These oligarchs are accountable to no democratic forces in this or any other country.

2) The democratic, organized union movement and working class unity, are long gone. By sending jobs and manufacturing off-shore to other countries, the oligarchs have undermined and destroyed the traditional vehicles for mass opposition to corporate greed and manipulation. This has been accomplished within a legal anti-union framework and the de-politicalization of the working class. There are currently no voices or forces capable of opposing the oligarchs at this time.

3) The oligarchs have seized control of all branches of the U.S. government. The Congress is composed of millionaires accountable to monied interests. The judiciary is no longer chosen by any conceivable democratic process, and consists of the most right-wing zealots that the religious right and prosecutorial machines can envisage. Decisions emanating from the highest courts of both the state and federal governments are so shockingly oppressive as to harken back to the opportunistic courts so aptly described in Robert Mueller’s “Hitler’s Justice,”

The Executive Branch speaks in terms of bi-partisanship, which really means “obey your corporate handlers.” The differences between the policies of the Bush vs. the Obama administration are simply insignificant.

4) The media is controlled and dominated by the oligarchs to the point that any attempts at transparency concerning what is occurring nationally or internationally are met with prosecutions and violence. Whistleblowers, or independent media, publish under threat of serious retaliation.

5) The Oligarchy is so powerful that it is able to halt all attempts at regulation or limitation on their power or wealth. Wall Street and the banking industry continue to pillage at will, and many Americans have lost their life savings, their housing, passable public education, health care, and social services. The super-rich have stolen the wealth of the nation, and the oligarchs have made it impossible for us to take the money back.

6) The rapacious imperialism we see in the Middle East, and throughout the world is no longer controlled and defined by the U.S. government, or the Pentagon, but by mercenary armies outfitted, financed and directed by private corporate interests. It is questionable whether the President of the U.S. or the Pentagon even have the authority to hire or fire these mercenary forces.

Given this pessimistic, but realistic, assessment of the current situation, what are the alternatives available to the American people to regain control over the wealth and politics of the country?

1) PARTICIPATION IN THE ELECTORAL PROCESS

People can attempt to organize within the two-party political system dominated by the oligarchs in hopes that the democratic process will allow change to come peacefully and fairly through the electoral process, i.e. that the door is still open for organizing within this forum. If anyone believes such change is possible through the electoral process, and that it will happen soon enough to stop the disastrous course this country is headed in, then we urge them to turn on Fox News, circle the wagons, buy gold, and wait for the military, either ours or the enemy’s, to arrive at your doorstep.

Some people feel that organized labor, now less than 9% of the voting public, could have a significant impact on electoral politics. We don’t share their optimism in this regard.

2) BUILDING ALTERNATIVE INSTITUTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS

People can attempt to organize locally, and in communities in ways that avoid contact with corporations and institutions associated with the oligarchs, and strive to build “alternative institutions” and communities and economic systems outside of corporate control. The Green Movement, Yes Magazine, Global Exchange and a variety of groups throughout the nation have embraced this perspective, and hope to build a resistance and world-view separate and distinct from the empire. While such efforts have had notable success in many communities, the ability of such groups to form any meaningful counter-force to the oligarchs is marginal, at best. Perhaps, if these movements were to spread nationally to encompass an ever-growing portion of the disenfranchised population, there could be a new player on the block that could unseat the oligarchs. The idea that such a “revolution” could be accomplished non-violently, or with the cooperation of the oligarchs themselves, seems like a pipe dream to the authors. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal.

3) SUPPORTING INTERNATIONAL OPPOSITION

People might also look to international forces that stand opposed to U.S. hegemony throughout the world. Opposition to the manipulations of the dollar by U.S. banks and capital, contempt for US military forays throughout the Middle East and the World; hatred of U.S. corporate and mercenary interventions into the democratic processes of governments throughout the world (coupled with QE2), have all combined to render the U.S. one of the most despised nations in the world. Americans seeking to unseat the oligarchy could support whatever countries stand in opposition to Empire and lend whatever form of legal support is possible for these opposing forces. The successes of the 60s were in many ways attributable to the leadership provided internationally by the Vietnamese, the Cubans, and the other revolutionary struggles that inspired Americans at home.

4) CREATING COMMUNITIES FOR SELF-PROTECTION AND DEFENSE

In many areas of the country, people are forming self-help groups that share resources, teach each other self-defense, engage in joint health-giving techniques, provide collective necessities (food, shelter, nursing assistance), etc., outside of the governmental agencies traditionally responsible for providing a safety net. Because the oligarchs have decided to keep all of the wealth for themselves, they have actively sought to destroy the systems that Americans fought and worked for, including unemployment, medicare, social security, public education, medical services, retirement and other benefits. While there is little formal communication among the sets of communities described above, the potential for establishing such networks is certainly there. In the movie Battle of Algiers, the resistance movement created its own legal / social / cultural alternative to the colonial government dominated by the French. In those areas where disenfranchised people can unite and support each other, this approach might be most efficacious.

All of these alternatives are possible and plausible. We must continue to reject the tendencies toward depression/rage and immobilization, and seek new solutions -- a new society that has viable economic and environmental alternatives.

Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former associate director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. She can be contacted at info@progressiveavenues.org,

Luke Hiken is a former supervising attorney at the California Appellate Project, and has engaged in the practice of criminal, immigration, and appellate law.

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Vincent Di Stefano: While the Hegemon Caves From Within

While the Hegemon Caves From Within

by Vincent Di Stefano article link

November 13, 2010 | CommonDreams

The results of the US mid-term elections reflect a return of cynicism and ennui among those who were moved by the visionary promises of Barack Obama as he campaigned for the presidency a short 2 years ago. In May 2008, when campaigning in North Carolina, he described the core message of his campaign in the following terms: "It's not enough just to replace the party in the White House. We've got to change our politics as well." Our collective memories are too short. Our expectations too easily side-stepped.

The past two years have shown that in US politics, it is still business as usual. The problem, of course, is that US business continues to affect us all.

While Obama, shadowed by 250 US business executives, was meeting with high dignitaries in India on his 10-day tour through Southeast Asia, his erstwhile opponent-become-Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton, accompanied by her Defense Secretary Robert Gates, were meeting with Julia Gillard and her new coterie in Australia.

And while Obama was busily negotiating new arms deals which included securing a $3.5 billion contract for 10 Boeing C-17 cargo planes -- the sixth biggest arms deal in US history -- and lining up an additional $11 billion order for 126 combat fighter jets for the Indian air force, Clinton and Gates were meeting with Australian politicians and military planners in order to secure an increased US military presence in Australia.

It was therefore both politic and pragmatic that Obama was met by Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, and Jeffrey Imelt, CEO of General Electric, when Air Force One touched down on the Tarmac of Mumbai airport on 7th November. General Electric was recently contracted to supply 107 F414 engines for the new Tejas lightweight jet fighter presently being constructed in India. And for the past 2 years, GE-Hitachi have been jockeying for the construction of new nuclear power stations in India.

It would seem that the US presidency has more decidedly become an office to promote the sale of US arms in a world already ravaged by the effects of too many wars and too much deadly weaponry.

There is no shortage of irony. In a speech given at a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament in New Delhi on 8th November, Obama invoked the spirits of both Gandhi and Martin Luther King: "I've always found inspiration in the life of Ghandiji and his simple and profound lesson to be the change we seek in the world." He went on to say: "After making his pilgrimage to India half a century ago, Dr. King called Ghandi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance 'the only logical and moral approach' in the struggle for justice and progress."

Words have ever been cheap in the theatre of politics. The contradiction between the rhetoric and the action in his speech in New Delhi is as sharp as it was in his acceptance speech for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize at Oslo a year ago.

Despite the hopes and the promises that brought Obama to the US presidency, American pragmatism continues to rule. If the US does not sell its jets and its weapons to India, then the Russians or the Europeans will. The Indian military remains one of the largest importers of military hardware on the planet despite the fact that tens of millions of Indian men, women and children continue to live in deep poverty. But the whole game plan has now changed. Many who were of the view that Barack Obama shared their insight into what was necessary during this time of escalating planetary difficulties have been left wondering what peculiar deception was at play.

Obama took office at a pivotal point in history. The Bush era had brought the theory and practice of political self-interest to a high pitch. The rich got richer, the already powerful got more power, the belligerent were given greater scope for the exercise of their belligerence.

As independent journalist Robert Freeman has so astutely pointed out, nothing really changed when Obama entered the White House. Mammon's rule was confirmed by Obama's selection of the unholy trinity of Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke to run the country's finances. Under Clinton, Larry Summers had single-mindedly driven the deregulation of banks that enabled the rape of national economies around the globe. He was appointed Head of the National Economic Council. Under George W. Bush, Timothy Geithner had already funneled trillions of dollars of public moneys to his old buddies on Wall Street in the guise of "saving the system". He was appointed Secretary of the Treasury. And as Chairman of the Federal Reserve since 2006, Ben Bernanke had presided over a series of monstrous excesses that fattened the already rich and flayed the poor of what little they had. Bernanke was re-appointed in his role by Obama.

And able economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and David Korten continue to remain on the margins awaiting the inevitable.

Most of Obama's choices have followed this pattern. Despite his promise to renew and to reform US politics, little has changed. According to Robert Freeman, US banks "are making the largest profits in their history and paying themselves the biggest bonuses on record." Meanwhile, both the Pentagon and the US armaments industry are as busy as ever. Oil and energy companies have demonstrated who is really calling the tune through their scuttling of the Copenhagen Climate Summit last year. Their activities continue unabated. While tar sands continue to be mined in Canada at enormous cost to the environment and enormous expenditure of energy, methane gas begins to pour out of the entire Siberian permafrost region and the Arctic seabed itself. The inexorable receding of immense continental glaciers bodes poorly for those populations dependent on the great river systems issuing from ancient glaciers for their drinking water and for the irrigation waters that enable food production.

The 2008 financial crisis offered an opportunity to clean up the dirty practices that bankrupted literally millions of householders by recklessly enabling unserviceable mortgages and that emptied untold numbers of pension funds and retirement savings by exploiting newly created financial instruments such as derivatives.

The unconditional multi-billion bailout of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler at that time similarly squandered an opportunity to completely redesign transport systems and to transform an obsolete industrial infrastructure.

These opportunities came and went while politicians argued, bankers schemed, oil companies colluded and armaments manufacturers planned.

It would seem we are a refractory species. Not until the situation has become irremediably dire do we begin to take the necessary collective action we could have taken and should have taken long before to prevent widespread collapse and progressive dissolution.

Let us never lose sight of the potencies available to us in familial and community awareness and action during these times of political dereliction and moral abandonment.

Vincent Di Stefano is a retired osteopath and author of "Holism and Complementary Medicine. History and Principles" published by Allen and Unwin in 2006. He lives in Australia and can be contacted at The Healing Project.

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John Kozy: The Mythical United States of America

The Mythical United States of America: Rushing into Backwardness

by Prof. John Kozy article link

November 11, 2010 | Global Research

The mythical United States of America so highly lauded exists nowhere. It is a Shangri-la. The Preamble of the Constitution makes perfectly clear what kind of nation the United States was meant to be. What exists today fulfills none of those goals. Some have argued that the nation was a fraud from day one. Whether accurate or not, what is clear is that it most certainly was quickly murdered by John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who wrote the decision known as Marbury v. Madison. Since that day, the Court has replicated England's seventeenth century political economy absent only the monarchy. Today's United States of America is a seventeenth century nation adorned with twenty first century trinkets, many deadly. Instead of being as it claims "the leader of the free world," it is a backward authoritarian pre-enlightenment reactionary regime.

Because my OED is inaccessible at the moment, I cannot specify exactly when the word 'philanthropy,' which etymologically means "love of mankind," came to be applied to the donating of money to build self aggrandizing enterprises. But alas, it has! People seem to have a way of twisting meanings in ways that make the malevolent appear benevolent. And so, enterprises of all kinds have been funded by such 'philanthropy.'

For instance, Carnegie Mellon University was founded by Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. and Richard B. Mellon; Cornell University was founded by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White; Purdue University was founded by John Purdue; Rice University was founded by William Marsh Rice; Stanford University was founded by Leland Stanford and his wife. There are hundreds more.

There are museums, too (The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, The Kimbell Art Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art and many more), concert halls (Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, The Eastman Theatre, Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center to name just a few), Opera Houses (The Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, The Peabody Opera House, The Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House, The BAM Howard Gilman Opera House), innumerable charitable foundations and buildings built for public use such a libraries.

Although it is difficult to deny some merit to most of these enterprises, it is also difficult to even imagine that when Christ said, "love thy neighbor as thyself," he was advocating the kind of love philanthropy has come to express. But belittling philanthropy is not the intent of this piece. These examples are intended solely to lay the basis for an exposition of some contrasts and to draw some revealing conclusions from them.

First of all, the kind of giving described above is not the only kind of giving that has become prevalent. During last week's midterm electioneering, unspecified amounts of money were donated anonymously to Political Action Committees in an attempt to influence the electoral process. What distinguishes this group of donors from those above is the anonymity. The benefactors, in the first group, like the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, have no qualms about putting their names on their projects. (I suspect that more often than not, they insist upon it.) But not the donors in the second group.

Why? I suspect a principle lies behind the difference: People do not hide that in which they take pride! The benefactors in the first group are proud of their giving, they want it made known to all, they want to be remembered for it. So why wouldn't the "benefactors" in the second group be equally proud of their beneficence? Are they merely cowards who lack the courage of their convictions? Or are they ashamed of what they are doing? Are they hiding their shame behind their anonymity? In either case, they cannot be judged kindly.

Anonymity, however, is just one manifestation of a deeper and growing tendency in American society—the trend toward more and more secrecy, and no one, to my knowledge, has revealed the ultimate, disastrous consequences of this tendency.

Recently, Sir John Sawers, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, devoted much of a 30-minute address to the central role of secrecy in maintaining security. “Secrecy", he said, "is not a dirty word. Secrecy is not there as a cover-up. Secrecy plays a crucial part in keeping Britain safe and secure. If our operations and methods become public, they won’t work.”

Alas, Sir John is obviously not a master of the King's English. Secrecy is by definition a cover-up. But Sir John doesn't mean cover-up in the simple sense of hidden; he wants to claim that nothing unseemly or objectionable is being covered up. Unfortunately, that claim is impossible to verify and, if accepted, must be accepted on trust. If someone claims s/he did nothing wrong, the what and how of it must be revealed. How else could it be shown? Yet Sir John claims that the what and how of it must be kept secret.

Consider the claim that the universe contains absolutely undetectable attributes. The sentence appears to make perfectly good sense, but it doesn't. How could the claim ever be given a truth value? All one can really do upon hearing or reading it is shrug one's shoulders. The sentence has no content. The claim that secrets are not cover-ups is similar. To know that what is secret is not a cover-up, the secret must be revealed, but by definition alone, a secret cannot be revealed and be a secret. Such claims are entirely meaningless.

So why should anyone trust the pronouncements of governments and their agents anyhow? That they lie has been demonstrated over and over again in history. In reality, all that the secrecy actually does is arouse suspicion; secrecy leads people to distrust their governments. It also leads nations to distrust each other, and a world in which nations distrust each other is unstable, dangerous, and primed for disaster.

Governmental secrecy also annuls any trappings of democracy that a nation may exhibit. Even a perfectly rational citizenry would be unable to make rational judgments on matters of policy that are kept from it by secrecy. How can anyone be expected to make a rational judgment about something s/he is unaware of? Rational thinking requires premises that are factual. Without that knowledge, the electoral process is a mere formal, meaningless exercise. The people may be told that they are sovereign, but they do not even play a meaningful role in the process. The trappings of democracy do not make a nation democratic. Only transparently revealed truth and honesty do.

Most people assume that the American government is paralyzed by ideological intransigence. The assumption is that our political class has taken the attitude, "my way or no way." But another possibility exists. Perhaps those who truly hold power, those who like things the way they are and want to contravene any change, immediately corrupt or isolate all newly elected officials and all of the ideological rhetoric that is heard is merely theater played to give people the impression that the politicians care. How else can anyone explain how everything stays the same after election after election calls for change? How else can the Congress continue to act as it always has in the face of decades of approval ratings in the lowest quartile? How else can anyone explain why Congress after Congress is a do nothing Congress? Is it because American elections are totally fraudulent? Is it because the Congress has a secret master who functions behind the electoral system?

The mythical United States of America so highly lauded exists nowhere. It is a Shangri-la. The Preamble of the Constitution makes perfectly clear what kind of nation the United States was meant to be. Read it! What exists today fulfills none of those goals.

Some have argued that the nation was a fraud from day one, that the convention that drafted the Constitution was comprised of colonial elite who set out to create a nation that protected their privileges. The facts cited by those making the claim are accurate; the reasoning is often strained. Yet the claim cannot easily be refuted.

Even if the nation was not stillborn, it most certainly was quickly murdered. The dastardly deed took place on February 24, 1803. The killer was John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who wrote the decision known as Marbury v. Madison, which is not only absurdly argued but treacherous on two accounts. First, Marshall takes the position that "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is" which results in the Court's becoming the sole Constitutional authority subject to no review. Since that day, the Court has ruled the United States of America as a judicial oligarchy. Second, the decision provides the Court with a paradigm on which it could base clearly and obviously unjust decisions. Marshall agreed that Marbury was entitled to relief but refused to provide it. That is clearly unjust; yet the Constitution clearly says that one of the nation's purposes is to "establish justice."

Even though Marshall's argument is absurd, no one but Jefferson challenged it. He writes, "the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch." It is clearly contradictory to say on the one hand that the Court has the duty to "say what the law is" and then say that the Court is constrained from providing Marbury with the relief he is entitled to because the written Constitution doesn't give the Court the authority to grant it. The written Constitution doesn't give the Court the authority to "say what the law is" either. Yet no one pointed out that if it were the Court's duty to say "what the law is," legislatures are superfluous. So Marshall on this day, murdered the Republic.

Why no one but Jefferson cared is curious. Was it, indeed, because the colonial elite who had taken control of the government never really fully supported the Constitution's republican principles? We will never know. But before the Constitution was ratified, the colonies were rife with political tracts both in favor of and against its ratification. The Federalist Papers are the most well known of these and were apparently written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. All three were alive when Marshall's opinion was issued; yet none wrote a single tract in opposition to Marshall's action. How strange!

Yet, the result is obvious. What John Marshall did was reproduce England's seventeenth century political economy absent only the monarchy, and the courts have promoted and maintained this abomination ever since. Today's United States of America is a seventeenth century nation adorned with twenty first century trinkets, many deadly. Instead of being as it claims "the leader of the free world," it is a backward authoritarian pre-enlightenment reactionary regime. That people is the big secret! It dare not be revealed.

In early modern Europe the state was organized to fight more and more intense wars which requirs professional armies and leads national governments into perennial debt. Some claim that the need to fight bigger and bigger wars created the state as we know it. Diplomacy was carried on by nations in secret from opponents, adversaries, and their own peoples. Although not yet known as such, Realpolitik characterized the age. Politics and diplomacy were based primarily on considerations of power and national interests, not ideals, morals, or principles. Balancing the power of authoritarian nations was said to be necessary to keep the peace, but it never did. How does this description of seventeenth century Europe differ from a description of the world's condition today? What is different?

Calling the United States a backward authoritarian pre-enlightenment reactionary nation may seem harsh, but how else can anyone explain, no less justify, the American willingness to overthrow democratically elected governments, support right-wing dictatorships, and become a willing partner with the most corrupt nations on earth? No nation steeped in the principles of democracy would engage in such practices.

So what do advocates of this seventeenth century realpolitik hope to achieve? To what end is this policy being pursued? Three hundred years of history has shown that it will never bring peace or security. Going to war to preserve the peace is absurd; anyone who advocates such nonsense should be ridiculed into hiding.

People, remember this. Empires upon which it was said that the sun never set disintegrated in plain daylight. All the king's horses and all the king's men could not bind them together. So I propose that everyone ask an Englishman this question: What of value does todays ordinary Englishman possess that s/he would not have possessed had the Empire never existed? When you learn the answer to that question you will realize how all the resources and lives lost to create and attempt to hold the Empire were totally wasted. And that is what always happens to the resources and people expended in empire building.

People, secrecy is an abomination. People do not hide that in which they take pride! When governments keep secrets, they're hiding shameful, immoral, or illegal acts. War is the opposite of peace and cannot secure it. Secrecy breeds distrust, suspicion, and conflict; they are not ways of winning friends and influencing people. Realpolitik is really Vilepolitik. Until the welfare of human beings everywhere rather than the welfare of institutions becomes the goal of human activity, the people will never be anything but canon and factory fodder to be sacrificed for absolutely nothing worthwhile.

So it's time, past time, way past time to close the door on seventeenth century authoritarian government.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

John Kozy is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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John Kozy: The Mythical United States of America

Nora Eisenberg: 10 Hard Truths About War for Veterans Day (and Every Other Day)

10 Hard Truths About War for Veterans Day (and Every Other Day)

By Nora Eisenberg article link

November 11, 2010 | AlterNet

Veterans Day, which Americans celebrate on November 11, was originally called Armistice Day, to commemorate the cessation of fighting in the Great War of 1914-1918. In the United States, the idea that this was “the war to end all wars,” (a phrase coined by H.G. Wells in a pamphlet of that name and echoed by Woodrow Wilson with equal earnestness) was challenged by an outspoken and persecuted peace movement, including poor farmers and black Americans conscripted at disproportionate rates.

Most Americans may have accepted the justification at the war's start, but by the war's end, with a U.S. body count of 117,000 and double that in serious injuries (and 37 million casualties overall on both sides, 16 million deaths and 21 million wounded), the signing of the Armistice by Allies and Germans at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 was met with celebration that it might mean a true “end of war.” In 1919, a year later, Armistice Day was established to celebrate "the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed."

After World War II and the Korean War, and the start of a heated Cold War, it was clear to the government that an armistice and peace were not in sync with the times. In 1954, Congress changed the name of the November 11 holiday to Veterans Day, exchanging peace for celebrating patriotic valor, and the ultimate sacrifice of life, limb and health in battling for one's country.

Today's veterans are survivors of more than a half century of American wars—World War II, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, the 1991 Gulf War (which has never been officially declared over), and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As we celebrate our veterans this week, we would do well to remember the following realities that the public is barely aware of, but veterans know only too well:

1) It took almost 50 years for the government to acknowledge the suffering of more than 200,000 U.S. veterans exposed to the herbicide Agent Orange, which the U.S. military used for a decade to defoliate forests and destroy food sources in Vietnam. Despite higher incidences of cancer, neurological, digestive, skin, lung and heart disorders along with miscarriages and birth defects, the DoD denied any linkage of exposure and disease, and disability claims, which veterans initiated in 1977 were mostly denied. By 1993 only 400 veterans exposed to Agent Orange had been granted some compensation.

Class action suits against companies like Monsanto and Dow Chemical settled out of court for small amounts. After much advocacy by veterans and their supporters, the 1991 Agent Orange Act was passed, allowing the VA to declare specific conditions "presumptive" to Agent Orange. This summer the list was expanded to include B cell leukemias, such as hairy cell leukemia, Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease. Still, after five decades, compensation is small with the vast majority of awards at 20 percent or $243 montly.

2) Almost a third of the 700,000 veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffer from a profound physiological disorder called Gulf War Illness (formerly Gulf War Syndrome). For almost 20 years, the DoD and VA insisted that psychological stress alone was the cause of the fatigue, mood disorders, cognition and memory problems, and disorders of every physical system as well as birth defects of veterans' children. To date, some 11,000 veterans have died from the illness, and most survivors continue to suffer chronic symptoms. In 2008, the Gulf War Research Advisory Committee (RAC) reported what veterans have known too well—that wartime toxins, not stress, caused profound physical illness in almost 300,000 veterans of Desert Storm.

RAC identified in particular a class of neurotoxins found in experimental anti-nerve gas pills that troops were forced to take upon threat of court martial, pesticides and sarin gas, which plumed for hundreds of miles when Iraq munition storage facilities known to contain nerve gas were exploded. RAC did not rule out vaccines or depleted uranium, pioneered during the Gulf War for its ability to penetrate most anything. Yet the RAC report's recommendations for immediate interventions and programs have not been followed, but rather remain the subject of further study by the Institute of Medicine.

3) Veterans of ongoing fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered a variety of physical traumas beyond the widespread maiming and loss of limbs. Last year, the DoD warned that as many as 20 percent of veterans (360,000) may have suffered traumatic brain injury from IED blasts. Blast injuries generally do not result in skull fractures or loss of consciousness, yet the Institute of Medicine has reported that these traumatic brain injuries may cause diffuse brain bleeding and result in PTSD and problems with mood, concentration, memory, pain, balance, hearing and vision.

In addition, veterans have suffered multiple toxic exposures, including contaminated water, and dioxin and other carcinogenic compounds from the widespread use of burn pits instead of incinerators in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everything from refrigerators to trucks to body parts has been reported burning in the vast pits, which spew black smoke for miles and cause the black phlegm known as “Iraq crud.” Several class action suits have been filed against contractors like KBR on behalf of veterans sickened by toxic exposure.

4) On any given night, more than 200,000 veterans are homeless, and 1.5 million veterans are considered at risk for homelessness. Because of lack of work, support networks and substandard housing, veterans without homes have served in every war with surviving populations--World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Vietnam veterans have long comprised the largest portion of the homeless veteran population, but veterans of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become homeless much sooner than veterans of the Vietnam War did. PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI) can cause severe psychiatric symptoms from mood disorders to depression, aggressive and dangerous behaviors, substance abuse and alcoholism. In addition to psychiatric, neurological and physical injury, multiple deployments, the high cost of housing, reduced job opportunities, and low wages endanger family stability, employability and maintaining a steady residence.

5) The population of homeless women has skyrocketed from 5 to 20 percent over the last decade as more women are deployed into battle. Women veterans are two to four times more likely than non-veteran women to be homeless. Approximately 40 percent of homeless female veterans of today's wars report being sexually assaulted by male soldiers while in service, with sexual abuse being a major risk factor for homeless according to the VA Homeless Programs director. Fifty-six percent of all homeless veterans are African American or Hispanic, despite being only 12.8 percent and 15.4 percent of the population, respectively.

6) Over a half million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are patients in the VA system. Thousands more wait as much as a year for VA treatment for serious ailments including traumatic brain injury. Forty-eight percent (243,685) are mental health patients and 28 percent (143,530) are being treated for PTSD. A recent internal VA memo revealed systematic gaming of the VA application process, whereby bureaucrats at facilities seek to improve access data by denying treatment.

7) Every day, five U.S. soldiers attempt suicide, a 500 percent increase since 2001. Every day 18 U.S. veterans attempt suicide, more than four times the national average. Of the 30,000 suicides each year in the U.S., 20 percent are committed by veterans, though veterans make up only 7.6 percent of the population. Female veteran suicide is rising at a rate higher than male veteran suicides.

8) The number of U.S. service men and women killed in Afghanistan has doubled in the first quarter of 2010, compared to the same quarter last year. In the first two months of 2010, injuries tripled.

9) Estimates of civilian deaths from violence in Iraq alone range from a conservative 105,000 (Iraq Body Count project) to over 1.2 million (UK pollster Opinion Research Business), with estimates by Johns Hopkins at 655,000. More than 125,000 civilians have been injured in Iraq and 4 million displaced, with civilian death and injury in 2010 rising each month. By most estimates, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or injured since the 2001 invasion; over 200,00 have been internally displaced; and over two million have become refugees, with civilian deaths and injuries rising dramatically in 2010.

10) U.S. veterans live with these horrific realities daily. Many are acutely aware as they suffer, of the suffering they have inflicted on others.

Nora Eisenberg is the director of the City University of New York's fellowship program for emerging scholars. Her writing has appeared in the Partisan Review, Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times and Tikkun. Her most recent novel, 'When You Come Home' (Curbstone, 2009), explores the the 1991 Gulf War and Gulf War illness.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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Noam Chomsky: Outrage, Misguided

Outrage, Misguided

By Noam Chomsky article link

November 09, 2010 | ICH

The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic and political situation.

More than half the “mainstream Americans” in a Rasmussen poll last month said they view the Tea Party movement favorably—a reflection of the spirit of disenchantment.

The grievances are legitimate. For more than 30 years, real incomes for the majority of the population have stagnated or declined while work hours and insecurity have increased, along with debt. Wealth has accumulated, but in very few pockets, leading to unprecedented inequality.

These consequences mainly spring from the financialization of the economy since the 1970s and the corresponding hollowing-out of domestic production. Spurring the process is the deregulation mania favored by Wall Street and supported by economists mesmerized by efficient-market myths.

People see that the bankers who were largely responsible for the financial crisis and who were saved from bankruptcy by the public are now reveling in record profits and huge bonuses. Meanwhile official unemployment stays at about 10 percent. Manufacturing is at Depression levels: one in six out of work, with good jobs unlikely to return.

People rightly want answers, and they are not getting them except from voices that tell tales that have some internal coherence—if you suspend disbelief and enter into their world of irrationality and deceit.

Ridiculing Tea Party shenanigans is a serious error, however. It is far more appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Now Tea Party sympathizers are hearing that every institution—government, corporations and the professions—is rotten, and that nothing works.

Amid the joblessness and foreclosures, the Democrats can’t complain about the policies that led to the disaster. President Ronald Reagan and his Republican successors may have been the worst culprits, but the policies began with President Jimmy Carter and accelerated under President Bill Clinton. During the presidential election, Barack Obama’s primary constituency was financial institutions, which have gained remarkable dominance over the economy in the past generation.

That incorrigible 18th-century radical Adam Smith, speaking of England, observed that the principal architects of power were the owners of the society—in his day the merchants and manufacturers—and they made sure that government policy would attend scrupulously to their interests, however “grievous” the impact on the people of England; and worse, on the victims of “the savage injustice of the Europeans” abroad.

A modern and more sophisticated version of Smith’s maxim is political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics,” which sees elections as occasions when groups of investors coalesce in order to control the state by selecting the architects of policies who will serve their interests.

Ferguson’s theory turns out to be a very good predictor of policy over long periods. That should hardly be surprising. Concentrations of economic power will naturally seek to extend their sway over any political process. The dynamic happens to be extreme in the U.S.

Yet it can be said that the corporate high rollers have a valid defense against charges of “greed” and disregard for the health of the society. Their task is to maximize profit and market share; in fact, that’s their legal obligation. If they don’t fulfill that mandate, they’ll be replaced by someone who will. They also ignore systemic risk: the likelihood that their transactions will harm the economy generally. Such “externalities” are not their concern—not because they are bad people, but for institutional reasons.

When the bubble bursts, the risk-takers can flee to the shelter of the nanny state. Bailouts—a kind of government insurance policy—are among many perverse incentives that magnify market inefficiencies.

“There is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle,” economists Peter Boone and Simon Johnson wrote in the Financial Times in January. “Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it out. This response teaches the financial sector: Take large gambles to get paid handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs—they will be paid by taxpayers” through bailouts and other devices, and the financial system “is thus resurrected to gamble again—and to fail again.”

The doomsday metaphor also applies outside the financial world. The American Petroleum Institute, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and the other business lobbies, has intensified its efforts to persuade the public to dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—with considerable success, as polls indicate. Among Republican congressional candidates in the 2010 election, virtually all reject global warming.

The executives behind the propaganda know that global warming is real, and our prospects grim. But the fate of the species is an externality that the executives must ignore, to the extent that market systems prevail. And the public won’t be able to ride to the rescue when the worst-case scenario unfolds.

I am just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi barbarism, to borrow the words of Fritz Stern, the distinguished scholar of German history. In a 2005 article, Stern indicates that he has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews “a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.”

The world is too complex for history to repeat, but there are nevertheless lessons to keep in mind as we register the consequences of another election cycle. No shortage of tasks waits for those who seek to present an alternative to misguided rage and indignation, helping to organize the countless disaffected and to lead the way to a better future.

© The New York Times News Service/Syndicate

Noam Chomsky, who has taught linguistics at MIT since 1955, has revolutionized the scientific study of language. A prolific author and activist, Chomsky has weighed in on all major political issues of the last five decades. His most recent book, "Hopes and Prospects", a survey of the dangers and prospects of our early twenty-first century, is available on Amazon.com and elsewhere.

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Ted Rall: As the Country Falls Apart, It's Time for Our Revolution

As the Country Falls Apart, It's Time for Our Revolution

By Ted Rall article link

November 10, 2010 | Seven Stories Press | AlterNet

The following is an excerpt from Ted Rall's new book, The Anti-American Manifesto (Seven Stories, 2010).

You can feel it. Or maybe you can't.

It doesn't matter whether you feel it or not. It's happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it -- not merely as the world's dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity -- is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises.

Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn't feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome.

Not at all.

But we're not here to talk about the vague possibility of collapse at some point in the future. We are here -- in this book and within this historical moment -- because the collapse feels as though it is currently in progress.

We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There's going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It's going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

Definitions:

Us: Hard-working, underpaid, put upon, thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people

Them: Reactionary, stupid, overpaid, greedy, shortsighted, exploitative, power-mad, abusive politicians and corporate executives

In 2008, like the people of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, we put our hopes into a young new leader. He is the kind of fresh-faced reformer who just might have been able to do some good had he been put into power decades ago. "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job," read the headline in the satirical weekly newspaper the Onion after Barack Obama won. He has failed. It is by design that internal reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev and Obama inevitably come too late to actually accomplish anything. Even if a leader like Obama were inclined to push for the sweeping reforms that might save American late-stage capitalism from itself, as did Franklin D. Roosevelt -- and there is no evidence that the thought has crossed Obama's mind -- his fellow powerbrokers, fixated on quarterly profit statements and personal position, would never allow it.

The media talks a lot about reform. But it's too late for nips and tucks. Reform can only fix a system if the system is viable and open to change. Neither is true about the United States of America.

A veneer of normalcy slapped -- sloppily slapped -- on top of a stinking pile of obviously out-of-control unsustainability can no longer disguise the ugly truth: The United States of America is finished. Shopkeepers still take our dollars, foreigners still fear our bombs, but watching the crazy federal deficits, the wildly expanding international military presence, the putrid joke that is our healthcare / education / employment system, and a natural world in free fall (mainly due to the crap pumped into the air and water by the people and corporations of the United States) makes the debate over whether Democrats are better than Republicans feel surreal.

Government exists to serve economic power. In the U.S. and globally, economic power is concentrated in business, namely the large corporations whose profits account for more than ten percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Corporations can't operate without the government. They are codependent, yet independent of and barely responsive to the nation. A nation goes on with or without its government, with or without the big businesses we take for granted.We are not the government that serves those companies. They are parasites, vampires, hideous monsters that underpay and overcharge us and get fat on the spread. Who are we then?

We are their victims. We are weak and pathetic. But only by choice.

We can wait for the system to collapse of its own accord, for the rage of the downtrodden and dispossessed to build, for chaos of some sort to expose and destroy it. But implosion might take a long time. And when it happens, we may find ourselves even more powerless than we are now. They -- the hardcore, racist, undereducated, fundamentalist Christian, anti-civil liberties Right -- are preparing to step into the breach, to seize power. They can't wait to unleash their venomous hatred on the city-dwelling commie hipster fags they despise. They are armed. They recognize that the system is doomed. They've seen this coming. They're organized and willing to merge their disparate brands of conservatism under a common leadership. Most importantly, they get it. They don't need to be convinced that everything is in play. They're putting it in play.

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-the-worlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with "mainstream" gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the "Godless," "secular" United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force -- the sole force -- poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood's prescient novel The Handmaid's Tale -- rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we're suffering under today -- is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction.

Although the U.S. has fascist tendencies, it is unlikely that an ascendant American right would embrace fascism in its classic form. But a post-collapse reactionary government would likely have some attributes of fascism. Robert Paxton, who was my history professor at Columbia and is widely regarded as the nation's leading expert on the field, wrote the book on the subject (The Anatomy of Fascism). As Professor Paxton told me in 1991, the United States is the nation that is the most likely to go fascist, the one that has the most of the necessary ingredients -- including distrust of parliamentary democracy, extreme militarism, and a highly industrialized society -- required for a true fascist state. As things stand, there will be no one to prevent this nightmare.

So this book is a call to arms. And an appeal to self-preservation to those who know we can do better.

If Not Now, When?

A war is coming. At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?

History does not really repeat itself. No two historical moments are ever the same. The circumstances that govern a given street corner in Pittsburgh at 8:00 p.m. on December 9, 2011, will never recur.

Yet the motivations and needs of human beings remain constant. There are always parallels with the past, lessons to be learned, bits and pieces that will apply to present and future circumstances. There are even a few eternal truths.

Thinking about the present situation, the historical analogy that best seems to fit the current crisis is the collapse -- to be exact, the period shortly before the collapse -- of the Soviet Union. The parallels are instructive and scary:

* Overextended empire (U.S. forces currently fighting in Yemen, Pakistan, the Philippines, Colombia, Haiti, plus more than five hundred thousand soldiers and U.S.-funded mercenaries stationed in hundreds of bases around the world)

* Fiscal crisis (skyrocketing national debt owned by foreigners, insane military budget, soaring trade deficits, crash of credit markets, wildly imbalanced tax structure)

* Foreign quagmire (to wit, Afghanistan and Iraq) ! Rising rampant unemployment (unofficial rates over 20 percent)

* Lack of confidence of the citizenry in their government

* Increasingly out-of-touch rulers (government officials talking about economic recovery, declaring recessions over when they never talk about them starting, focusing on bank bailouts when everyone knows it would be more effective to directly help mortgage holders)

* Exceptionalist delusions (the belief that we're too big, different, and good to fail, which stifles any attempt to discuss problems)

* Widespread apathy (low voter turnout, disinterest in news and politics, drastically low newspaper readership but growth of hyperlocal media)

* Weak or nonexistent opposition

That last item is where you come in.

You must change that. You must become strong. You must organize. You must do whatever it takes to oppose the system.When you get the chance, you must destroy it. If you don't kill it, it will die nonetheless. But it will drag us down along with it. That is what happened to the Russians. Though some Marxist analysts attribute the events of 1991 to counterrevolutionary forces -- the politicians who gathered around Boris Yeltsin certainly fit the bill in some respects -- the Soviet government wasn't actually toppled. It collapsed. Broke and ideologically exhausted, its adherence to revolutionary socialist principles having devolved to mere lip service, the very idea of government as a viable and necessary entity withered and disappeared. Power decentralized. Without an organized group of opposition leaders poised to take the reins, the vacuum was filled by former factory managers and gangsters who backed the men who morphed into Russia's present-day oligarchs.

Today Russia is the world's biggest narcostate, a playground for biznesmeni (businessmen) and brutal men who murder journalists and anyone else who criticizes them. Disparity of wealth has soared. A tiny elite, one or two percent of the population, owns everything. There are slot machines in the Moscow metro.

Revolution, though bloody and terrifying, would have been easier than the slow convulsions of collapse. So it will be here.

If the U.S. government is going to collapse anyway, it behooves us to first replace it with something that can stand in its place. Unless we act, we'll have to deal with a post-collapse scenario, in which we'll have to fend off roving criminal gangs, hoodlums, predatory corporations, oppressive residual government entities, and an emboldened political right.

Mad Max, Not Ecotopia

The enemy is inertia. There are a zillion reasons not to do anything; indeed, we Americans haven't done anything -- hell, we haven't thought about doing anything -- for generations. So, at risk of repeating myself, I must emphasize that our current crisis -- economic and political collapse, a surging right poised to take over, with possible environmental apocalypse looming just around the corner -- is not going to resolve itself in a way that we like if we sit on our asses. The current U.S. government must be prophylactically removed. Our economic and social structure must be radically reinvented. These things can only happen by using force.

Though small in numbers, anarchists and "deep-green" anti-civilization environmentalists are highly influential in what passes for the American Left, publishing well-regarded books, magazines, and blogs that inspire many people. Deep-green types fantasize about a collapse scenario that will save the world without anyone having to lift a finger. They imagine an involuntarily deindustrializing economy that allows the earth to heal while people gather to form small clans and low-impact villages based on ideals of equality. Here is a quote from Jan Lundberg, a deep-green proponent of "peak oil" theory: "New social norms and tribal law will help break from the past and possibly outlaw incipient reversion to the failed system of exploitation of people and nature. In any case, the 'new' model of sharing and cooperation will outdo in productivity any vestiges of the old models of selfishness and trying to insulate oneself or one's family from the surrounding changed world."

That would be nice, but I don't see how the deep-green idyll could logically follow the disintegration of the United States government. Theoretically, people might form intentional communities (the current term for communes) and/or polyamorous clans of one hundred to one hundred fifty in Ecotopia (the term for a theoretical independent Pacific Northwest), living off the land, all local and sustainable-like. But these utopian societies won't be able to count on being left alone to live peacefully. The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists happen to be the best-armed people around, and they despise just about everyone who doesn't think and pray like them. They will see collapse as affirmation of their beliefs that secular liberalism is destructive. They will also see it as an opportunity to create a new, ordered world atop the ashes. They will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach niggers a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn't fit into their vision of what and who is right. Anarchists may opt out of revolution, but counterrevolution will come to them.

Collapse of the U.S. government will be a multidimensional disaster. People, infrastructure, and institutions we count on will be destroyed. How will we live without water treatment plants, heating fuel, and industrially-manufactured medicines? What will likely follow will be frightening and even more destructive: post-Soviet-style gangster capitalism, perhaps, warlordism in rural areas, a hard turn to the racist right, even genocide. Doing nothing will seal our doom.

So let's do something. Let's seize power now, before it's too late. Before they (the bad people who are waiting in the wings) do.

If you are old enough to remember the early 1980s, how did you feel when you watched the news and saw Polish workers rise up under the banner of the Solidarity movement?

When Chinese students took over Tiananmen Square?When the citizens ofMoscow took to the streets to put down a coup by Soviet officialsmeant to end perestroika? When you watched Afghan women burn their burqas after the 2001 U.S. invasion that deposed the Taliban? You were probably thrilled. After all, these news stories were presented by U.S. corporate media as officially approved acts of personal and national liberation. And there was some truth to that. These were acts of free will. Of courage. In defense of freedom. You had to have been happy.

I was. I was excited -- even though I knew there was less than met the eye to these news accounts. Afghan women, for example, got paid five hundred bucks each by major network television crews to burn their burqas. After the Broll had been shot, they bought new burqas for a buck and put them on. I was in Afghanistan at the time, so I know the truth. Yet the power of television is such that I am moved when I watch this (phony) footage. Even though it's bullshit. It's like the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in 2003. It is known that the show at Firdos Square was staged3 by a U.S. Army "Psy-Ops" propaganda detachment. The men kicking "Saddam's" head were flown in from exile on U.S.military transports for the occasion; many of them weren't even Iraqi. Nevertheless, images of liberation are always intoxicating.

How do you feel when you hear about a revolution? You feel good. Oppressors have been toppled, justice has been served, and the people have taken control of their own destiny.

So why not you?

Why not us? Why shouldn't we free ourselves? Why shouldn't we seize the mansions and bank accounts of the rich/thieves? Why shouldn't we nationalize corporations? Why can't we take the CEOs who pay themselves millions while firing workers, put them on trial, and throw them in prison? Why shouldn't we bring home the foot soldiers of the military-industrial complex, close the bases overseas, end the wars, and use the resulting peace dividend to build schools and pay teachers decently and heal the sick?

Why let people in other countries have all the fun/take all the risks? Because the U.S. government is mean? Because its police and soldiers and security apparatus will shoot and beat and jail and ruin anyone and anything that opposes it? Cowardice is no excuse.

It isn't even viable. In the not-so-long run, taking no these bastards continue to screw up our country, our nations, and our natural world, we will die horribly anyway. Those in power are tenacious; if only to save ourselves from their now widely apparent excesses, we must be more determined and persistent and ruthless and violent than they are.

Revolution? Here's an App for That

No there isn't.When I showed early drafts of this manifesto to my friends, many asked: What should I do? Should I hide in the mountains? Learn how to shoot? Stockpile guns and canned food? Rob a bank? Or should I just live my life, remain alert, and train myself to recognize the revolutionary moment when it comes, so I can spring into action?

I get it, they told me. We're in trouble. We need a revolution. But there aren't any groups to join. What do you want us to do, Rall?

Well, that's not what this book is about. I don't want to lead a revolution -- not because I'm not willing, but because I wouldn't be good at it. I'm not wired that way. I've never even been a community organizer.

I want to kick people in the ass. To get them thinking. To get you thinking. I want you to understand the situation -- your situation. I want you to see that revolt is a good idea, and that it has never been more necessary. I also want you to size up the opposition (both the government and action is by far the more dangerous prospect. If we let the extreme right): They will never get weaker.We have as good a chance at taking them on as ever.

I want you to lead the revolution -- not by giving orders, but by choosing to revolt. Lead, in other words, by taking possession of yourself.

What should you do? Mao said revolution isn't a dinner party, meaning that it's often ugly, violent, and even unjust. I say revolution isn't like joining MoveOn.org or a Facebook group. You don't just click a link and authorize a PayPal donation. Revolution doesn't happen within the system; revolution is the act of destroying the system. Who are you? That's the first question.What you should do is one thing if you're a taxi driver, something else if you're an accountant who plays in a band on weekends, and something different entirely if you're a kid.

It's not like no one has ever had to figure this stuff out before.When France fell to the Germans in 1940, a significant minority of Frenchmen decided to resist the occupation. But they didn't know what to do,much less who they could trust. There wasn't a Resistance yet. So people went about their business, looking and waiting for a chance to do something. The first step, it turned out, was reaching out to other people.Would neighbors help? Or at least keep quiet? Sometimes the patriots judged incorrectly. Collaborators turned in friends, even members of their own families, to the Gestapo. The stakes were high: torture, death, possibly the murder of their families. Obviously, this isn't Vichy France -- but finding allies you can trust is a logical first step.

After they had formed cells, the next step for would-be French resisters was to decide what form their resistance would take. Some Parisian policemen tipped off Jews that they were about to be arrested. Train workers, many of whom were members of the communist labor union CGT, collected intelligence with a view toward passing it along to the Allies. Some women slept with high-ranking Nazi officers in order to collect pillow talk or allow a comrade to kill the officers during sex. In short, people did what they could.

What can you do? That's up to you. You know yourself. I don't. Figure it out.

It seems likely that at this point in history a decentralized organization -- a "group" that isn't a group at all, an organization without any leadership whatsoever, a group that is really a set of principles and ideas -- stands a better chance of successfully avoiding high-tech government spying and carrying out actions. The Earth Liberation Front, for example, includes among its principles that no humans or animals should be harmed while carrying out an ELF action. There are several other rules. If you follow all of them, congrats! You're "in" ELF. Other contemporary examples of decentralized organizations include the Animal Liberation Front, Al Qaeda, and the Tea Party. Al Qaeda famously allows itself to be "franchised." Though based in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda now has spin-off groups such as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and Yemen). Think of all the Al Qaeda "number two" men who have been killed or arrested since 9/11 -- Al Qaeda has only grown stronger. That's because personalities don't matter in a decentralized movement. Ideas do. The more a government tries to crush a decentralized resistance organization, the more moderates are radicalized by heavy-handedness. Now we even have the newly identified phenomenon of "self-radicalization," in other words, the process of reading and getting pissed off.

Action is preferable to inaction. But there's always a place for "sleepers" -- people who wait until the moment is right to strike. Maybe they want to see the early signs of a mass uprising before committing themselves. Or perhaps they're unwilling to participate directly yet are willing to provide passive assistance -- a safe house, say, or financial help or simply looking the other way when something is going down. Part of the revolution may be fought virtually, by hackers. These individuals are every bit as valuable as people who blow stuff up.

Will the United States ever generate a mass movement? Will thousands or even millions of people be willing to commit to militant action against the state? I don't know.

I don't think it matters. If everyone waits to see who else is willing to take the chance to resist before resisting himself or herself, no one will resist. As we saw in apartheid-era South Africa, the existence of even small, radical, armed cadres could move the national conversation toward action on the part of millions of others.

I can't hold your hand. I don't want you to buy into everything I say. It's not about me. I don't care if you agree with me. I MAY BE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING

I want you to THINK dammit! Figure out for yourself what is wrong. Then, once you know what's wrong, don't just grab a beer and veg out, or go to a yoga class, or whatever. Act! Do something about it!

To paraphrase a woman who spent time in prison for her radical activities in the 1960s, once you choose the path of committed citizenship, of true patriotism, of standing up for yourself and your fellow human beings and other living things who can't speak for themselves, your journey can end in only one of three ways: victory, prison, or death.

Then consider the alternative. Once you commit your self to apathy, laziness, and tacit consent to mass murder and rampant injustice, your miserable, wasteful choice can end only with death.

Copyright 2010 -- Seven Stories Press: All Rights Reserved

Ted Rall is a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York City. He is the author of The Anti-American Manifesto (Seven Stories, 2010). Visit Ted Rall's site for more.

© 2010 Seven Stories Press All rights reserved.

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Ted Rall: As the Country Falls Apart, It's Time for Our Revolution

Nomi Prins: Wall Street Wins Again

Wall Street Wins Again

by Nomi Prins article link article link

November 9, 2010 | TruthDig | CommonDreams

The Republicans may have stormed the House, but it was Wall Street and the Fed that won the election. Regardless of party power plays and posturing, there are two constants that remain unaltered after the election. First, Wall Street will continue on with business as usual while shifting its campaign and lobbying dollars to the new winning team. And second, the Fed will keep on pretending to prop up the economy by buying more U.S. debt, thereby keeping interest rates low, the dollar weak and money cheap for the banking system to inhale. This fictional boosting of the financial economy, absent the real boosting of the general economy, will march on sans debate, inspection or restriction.

In the wake of the election, the Fed pulled off a move detected only by downtown Manhattan. It quietly announced a purchase of $600 billion in Treasury securities (read: our debt) while pundits on the left and right were dissecting the role of the tea party in political life as we know it, the Obama dissatisfaction quotient, and the chance of Sarah Palin heading for the White House in 2012.

That $600 billion figure was about twice what the proverbial "analysts" on Wall Street had predicted. This means that, adding to the current stash, the Fed will have shifted onto its books about $1 trillion of the debt that the Treasury Department has manufactured. That's in addition to $1.25 trillion more in various assets backed by mortgages that the Fed is keeping in its till (not including AIG and other backing) from the 2008 crisis days. This ongoing bailout of the financial system received not a mention in pre- or postelection talk. No one in Congress or the White House gets a say on the maneuver. Yet, it was the Fed buying more treasuries, and not the fact that the Republicans gained control of the House, that caused the Dow to shoot to a 2010 high and bank stocks to rally 2 percent on average.

Like many other Americans, as the results of the elections were pouring in for insta-analysis I was obsessively flipping cable TV channels. It didn't matter whether I landed on Fox, CNBC or MSNBC, the same two main items were being debated: (1) the tea party's rise and (2) the other victorious Republicans (including the ones labeled as tea party candidates-even though they did not actually run as candidates of a separate party, a trick that progressives have never managed to pull off or even try).

All the Republicans sang their refrain from the same song sheet, vowing to work on extending George W. Bush's tax cuts, killing what they refer to as Obamacare, cutting spending (though none gave specific details as to how) and, of course, getting Americans back to work. The catch-and this was a notion taken up by President Barack Obama and ignored by the Fed the very next day-is that the Republicans wanted to do so the free-market way, by reducing government constraints on businesses so they can stop worrying about obstacles like rules, and thus somehow spontaneously start hiring more. (Note: To underscore this strategy, CNBC paraded a bunch of chief executive officers on screen throughout the election night.)

But, for the most part, the Republicans left the so-called financial reform bill alone as a topic, except to make it clear, as incoming House Majority Whip (aka 2012 contender) Eric Cantor did, that they don't want onerous regulations (it is much better to wait for the next leg of this crisis and the loss of more jobs and homes, apparently, than to bar Wall Street from financial innovation).

Here's what wasn't mentioned during the election or postelection chatter: the cost and logic of bailing out, subsidizing and now propping up Wall Street as it heads decisively (despite Obama's promises of those days of fill-in-the-blank being over) to another year of record bonuses.

No winning Republican mentioned repealing the financial reform bill, since it doesn't really actually reform finance, bring back Glass-Steagall, make the big banks smaller or keep them from creating complex assets for big fees. Score one for Wall Street. No winning Democrat thought out loud that maybe since the Republican tea partyers were so anti-bailouts they should suggest a strategy that dials back ongoing support for the banking sector as it continues to foreclose on homes, deny consumer and small business lending restructuring despite their federal windfall, and rake in trading profits. The Democrats couldn't suggest that, because they were complicit. Score two for Wall Street.

In other words, nothing will change. And that, more than the disillusionment of his supporters who had thought he would actually stand by his campaign rhetoric, is why Obama will lose the White House in 2012.

Then, there's the Fed. Ben Bernanke, who like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has survived two administrations under different parties to have a hand in bailing out the banking system and fictitiously stabilizing the markets, continues to run the country into the path of massive debt in the name of easing money, so as to avoid the Second Great Depression from which Obama thinks he saved us (along with Geithner and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson).

Last Wednesday morning, Obama had the chance to at least attempt to re-engage the voters who believed in his mantra of change. In his contrition speech, he took responsibility (read: apologized) for having made it seem he extended government too much (thereby taking on the language of the Republican opponents), explaining that we were in an emergency situation (not that the banks screwed up and stole the life rafts). He assured businesses he was still on their side (in case the fact that he's keeping Wall Street lackey Geithner on and his ringing praise for Larry Summers on "The Daily Show" weren't sufficient signs).

It is likely that, going forward, Democrats will fear losing more seats in 2012 and vote more with the pro-bank center. That would be a mistake for them and bad for the country.

Yet sadly, Obama showed pre-emptive signs of capitulation with two words: free market. Toward the end of the Q&A session after his speech, Obama said that the free market has to be "nurtured and cultivated" and that he has to take responsibility to make clear to the business community and the country that the most important thing we can do is boost and encourage our business sector and make sure that companies are hiring. His facial expression was as hollow as his words. He added that "we" have been talking to CEOs constantly (and don't we all feel good about that?)-and that on his trip to Asia this week his whole focus will be on opening up markets, so "we can prosper, sell more goods and create more jobs in the United States" (that playbook comes from Bush Treasury Secretary Paulson, but that policy has been shown only to enable CEOs to outsource more, not less). He also pointed out that a whole bunch of corporate executives will join "us."

And that is the second reason he will not be re-elected: Businesses won't need to fund his next campaign when they can fund the Republicans now that they are back in vogue. Businesses will meanwhile just extract what they can as long as they can, like better deals abroad in the name of free markets-the kind that the Fed is subsidizing back here at home. Obama and his supporters will see this in 2012 if they don't now. The president could go all out and ignore the CEOs and focus on the general populace, but signs point to the contrary. If he has learned something from the November elections about loyalty to his voters, he isn't showing it. So maybe progressives should stop defending him and start yelling at him ... or seriously look for another 2012 candidate to run against Sarah Palin.

© 2010 TruthDig.com

Nomi Prins, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, is a senior fellow at the public policy organization Demos and the author of "Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America."

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Gary Younge: The "Tea Party" Does Not Exist

The "Tea Party" Does Not Exist

The Tea Party is not new, or coherent. It's merely old whine in new bottles

by Gary Younge article link article link

November 8, 2010 | The Guardian/UK | CommonDreams

Lectures about fiscal responsibility from the occupants of a plush suite on the 20th floor of one of the fanciest hotels in Las Vegas stick in the craw like a slice of cantaloupe swallowed sideways. Appropriately, the Tea Party Express's open bar, trays of fruit and skyline view at the Aria hotel on election night smacked more of a corporate event than a political, let alone a populist, one.

At one stage I turned to a man standing next to me and asked if he was a Tea Party supporter. "No," he said. "I was hoping you were." He was a state department official who had brought some foreign journalists in the hope of meeting some real Tea Party supporters to interview. But they couldn't find any. There is a reason for that.

The "Tea Party" does not exist. It has no members, leaders, office bearers, headquarters, policies, participatory structures, budget or representatives. The Tea Party is shorthand for a broad, shallow sentiment about low taxes and small government shared by loosely affiliated, somewhat like-minded people. That doesn't mean the right isn't resurgent. It is. But the forces driving its political energy are not those that underpinned its recent electoral success.

The Tea Party is not a new phenomenon. It's simply a new name for an old phenomenon - the American hard right. Over the last two years the term has provided a rallying point for a coalition of disparate groups, most of which have been around for many years. Minutemen (anti-immigrant vigilantes), birthers (who deny that Obama was born in the US), Promise Keepers (Conservative Christian men), Oath Keepers (military and police, retired and current, who vow to resist unconstitutional government "by any means necessary"), Fox News watchers, Glenn Beck lovers and Rush Limbaugh listeners who had no unifying identity before.

Having a name helps. It has offered a political identity to a significant number of people who were either not active or might not have understood themselves to be in any way connected. That name has helped reorient the stated priorities of the right away from social issues and towards fiscal ones. But this is no more than the old whine in new bottles.

Most of the characters now closely associated with the Tea Party are not new to rightwing politics. They have just moved from the margins to the mainstream. Sharron Angle, the failed Senate candidate from Nevada, has held state office since 1998. While in the 42-member state assembly she voted no so often on consensual matters that such votes were sometimes referred to as "41-to-Angle". The much-maligned Delaware Tea Party candidate, Christine O'Donnell, stood unopposed in the Republican primary in 2008 before going on to challenge Joe Biden. These people didn't join the Tea Party, the "Tea Party" term attached itself to them.

It is difficult to imagine a candidate earning the Tea Party label who is not against gay marriage or abortion, for the simple reason that no such candidate could exist. White Christian evangelicals still formed one of the most crucial bedrocks of last week's Republican success - comprising 25% of the electorate and giving 79% of their vote to the GOP. That's far more clout than black and Latino votes combined give the Democrats .

At first the term Tea Party helped us understand the insurgent, inchoate force that took to the streets last year; now it may be hindering analysis of its more choreographed march to power. For when people ask what the Tea Party will do, talk about Tea Party demands, or lay down Tea Party threats, they mistake (wilfully or otherwise) the Tea Party for a coherent formation with power of cohesive action. It's not.

Research conducted over several months by the Washington Post to contact every Tea Party group in the country found that many did not exist. Seventy per cent said they had not been involved in a political event in a year - a year in which the Tea Party was credited with transforming the nation's politics.

"When a group lists themselves on our website, that's a group," Mark Meckler, a founding member of the Tea Party Patriots, told the Post. "That group could be one person, it could be 10 people, it could come in and out of existence - we don't know."

This is less of a criticism than a description. Movement-building is hard, messy work that, if it is to be truly at grassroots level, produces uneven results. In that sense it's no different from, say, the anti-war movement, and would have been about as successful were not it for two key factors.

The first is that the Tea Party has its own "news" channel - Fox - devoted to its growth. It promotes Tea Party demonstrations as though they are events of national celebration and showcases those who pose as its leaders as though they are national celebrities. Second, it has money. A lot of it. When it comes to elections it has the backing of huge amounts of money from private corporations and individuals who are behind institutions - like the Tea Party Express, Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party Patriots - which are run by people with a proven track record of rightwing Republican activism.

The relationship between these organisations and the base of people who call themselves Tea Party supporters is episodic and erratic. They show up in different places where they sense an opportunity for a breakthrough, throw money at it, attract media attention for it, and then see what sticks. Sometimes it works, sometimes it backfires - mostly it makes barely any difference. They have no organic, let alone democratic, relationship with the grassroots that they claim, in some way, to represent. Sarah Palin, for example, endorsed 64 candidates this season. Half of them won last Tuesday; 10 lost in the primaries, 19 lost in the general elections, and three races are still too close to call. Her support is important, but hardly decisive.

It would be too easy to deduce from this that the Tea Party is simply a creation of big business and the rightwing media. Neither, alone, can explain the 50 or so conservative old men who have met at the Nugget Casino in Pahrump, a hard-scrabble town in rural Nevada, every Friday for the last five years, or most of the other groups I have seen around the country. It would also be too naive to suggest that such groups would boast anything other than a marginal presence without big money and media to amplify their voices.

What we witnessed on Tuesday was not a realignment of American politics but the first real test of the reconfiguration of the balance of forces in the American right. Exit polls show an electorate even more polarised than two years ago, where registered independents swung to Republicans but self-described moderates continued to back the Democrats. Sixty per cent of the seats that the Democrats lost were in districts where John McCain beat Obama in 2008.

Last December I interviewed Rand Paul, after he addressed about 12 people in a small town in Leitchfield, Kentucky, and asked what the Tea Party meant to him. "I call it the national open mic movement," he joked. "It's kind of good in a way. Some people were tired of not being able to speak their piece. But I don't think it has a cohesion yet. It's yet to be seen whether it can transform itself."

Back then Paul was a rank outsider; now he is a senator-elect. The Tea Party still has no cohesion, but it has been transformed. Not from the inside or below, but from the outside and above. Its name reflects a popular mood, its actions reflect an elite capability.

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US

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I'd Be Glad to Join the Tea Party, If...

The movement needs to broaden its attack on the corporate-political ruling class

by Dan Rodricks article link article link

November 7, 2010 | The Baltimore Sun | CommonDreams

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Tea Party Betrayed Already?

By Dave Johnson article link article link

November 7, 2010 | OpEdNews | Truthout

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End of the Illusion; Waking Up To a New Dawn

By Rob Kall article link

November 7, 2010 | OpEdNews

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Of Irony and Implosion

by David Michael Green article link

November 7, 2010 | CommonDreams

Gary Younge: The "Tea Party" Does Not Exist

Chris Hedges: A Recipe for Fascism

A Recipe for Fascism

by Chris Hedges article link article link

November 8, 2010 | TruthDig | CommonDreams

American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.

More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as "mainstream Americans" now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money-hundreds of billions of dollars-is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.

The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.

Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

The failure to question the utopian assumptions of globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum. Regulations, which we have dismantled, were the bulwarks that prevented unobstructed brutality and pillaging by the powerful and protected democracy. It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits.

The "inevitability" of globalization has permitted huge pockets of the country to be abandoned economically. It has left tens of millions of Americans in economic ruin. Private charity is now supposed to feed and house the newly minted poor, a job that once, the old liberal class argued, belonged to the government. As John Ralston Saul in "The Collapse of Globalization" points out, "the role of charity should be to fill the cracks of society, the imaginative edges, to go where the public good hasn't yet focused or can't. Dealing with poverty is the basic responsibility of the state." But the state no longer has the interest or the resources to protect us. And the next target slated for elimination is Social Security.

That human society has an ethical foundation that must be maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of globalization-from Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to Thomas Friedman-do for globalization and the free market what Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The response of these propagandists to the death rattles around them is to continue to speak in globalization's empty rhetoric and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian America harbored by many within the tea party.

We are ruled by huge corporate monopolies that replicate the political and economic power, on a vastly expanded scale, of the old trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Wal-Mart's gross annual revenues of $250 billion are greater than those of most small nation-states. The political theater funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them. The tea party rabble, to placate their anger, will also be encouraged by their puppet masters to attack helpless minorities, from immigrants to Muslims to homosexuals. All these political courtiers, however, serve the interests of the corporate state and the utopian ideology of globalism. Our social and political ethic can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed is good.

The old left-the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses-would have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.

We believe, like the Spaniards in the 16th century who pillaged Latin America for gold and silver, that money, usually the product of making and trading goods, is real. The Spanish empire, once the money ran out and it no longer produced anything worth buying, went up in smoke. Today's use in the United States of some $12 trillion in government funds to refinance our class of speculators is a similar form of self-deception. Money markets are still treated, despite the collapse of the global economy, as a legitimate source of trade and wealth creation. The destructive power of financial bubbles, as well as the danger of an unchecked elite, was discovered in ancient Athens and detailed more than a century ago in Emile Zola's novel "Money." But we seem determined to find out this self-destructive force for ourselves. And when the second collapse comes, as come it must, we will revisit wrenching economic and political tragedies forgotten in the mists of history.

© 2010 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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Chris Hedges: A Recipe for Fascism