The parallels between the administrations of Barack Obama and John Kennedy are stunning:

1.  Both engaged in what might be called "Election Deception":

 During the 1960 election, Kennedy attacked Nixon for being soft on communism, particularly Cuba.  In his book, 6 Crises, Nixon complained, bitterly and accurately, that this was an unscrupulous deception on Kennedy's part.  Kennedy had been briefed that Nixon and the CIA were planning a full scale invasion of Cuba.  So, even though he knew it wasn't true, Kennedy attacked Nixon from the right, claiming that he, Kennedy, was more of a hawk on Cuba than Nixon.  As soon as he got in, Kennedy told the CIA to forget their invasion plans; the CIA went ahead anyway at the Bay of Pigs; and Kennedy fired the top three men at CIA for disobeying his orders.[1]

The military shared Nixon's perception that Kennedy was a liar and a traitor.

During the 2008 election, Obama surrounded himself with hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski, and attacked Bush from the right, saying that he had neglected "the right war," the war in Afghanistan, and that he, Obama, would transfer troops and treasure to the effort in Afghanistan.  However, once he got in, Obama brought none of the Brzezinski people with him.  None of them.  Not Richard Clark.  Not Anthony Lake (both of whom were very active in Obama's campaign, and are very deep-cover operatives for the darkest side of the Pentagon).  And, as you will see, Obama fought bitterly with the military over their desire for more troops.

           

2.  Both Kennedy and Obama experienced a dramatic change of attitude toward the military early in their presidencies:

Even if Obama did not perpetrate a deception to win the election, after he was sworn in, his thinking and attitude toward the military began to change dramatically, sharpen and harden against them.  This directly parallels what happened to Kennedy. 

I don't regard Bob Woodward as a fundamentally reliable source, but to be an effective liar he has to tell important truths sometimes.  And I believe there is good reason to credit the story he tells below, inadvertently revealing the development of Obama's thinking on the war in Afghanistan. It describes a briefing given by Obama's National Security Advisor, Jim Jones, to the military commanders in Afghanistan (from Bob Woodward, The Washington Post, Jul 1, 2009, A1.):

 

During the briefing, [Marine Brigadier General] Nicholson had told Jones that he was "a little light," more than hinting that he could use more

forces, probably thousands more. "We don't have enough force to go everywhere," Nicholson said.

 

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. "At a table much like this," Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, "the president's principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan." The principals -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair -- made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson's Marines.

 

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, "oops," we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

 

"They then said, 'If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,' " Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

 

Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around at the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

 

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

 

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What The F(expletive)?" 

 

My take on the above is that Obama came in somewhat open minded on Afghanistan.  In his first month in office, he asked the military what they needed; they told him, and he gave them 17,000 troops without a blink.  When they turned around and asked for another 4,000 just a few months later, Obama was disconcerted.  If these guys knew what they were doing, they should have been right the first time about how many troops they needed.  But without a complaint, he gave them another 4,000.  When the generals started to press for more, Obama had his WTF moment, and sent Jones to straighten them out.  Jones was telling the generals that requesting more troops would be showing Obama that they are clueless.  Obama has tried to show his awareness that there are thousands of lives in the balance.

Kennedy had his Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment at the Bay of Pigs, and again during the Cuban Missile Crisis.[2]  He came to see his military advisors and commanders as blind-to-the-point-of-insane ideologues.  And the quote above I think shows that Obama's developing vision of the military has closely paralleled the development of Kennedy's vision of these professional killers.

3.  Kennedy faced, and Obama faces, a military full of ideologues:

 

Curtis LeMay is the most infamous of the insanely rabid military advisors Kennedy had.  LeMay, against specific orders, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, sent a U2 spy plane flying into Russian airspace, apparently hoping that the Russians would think this was an attack and push the red button.  LeMay was confident that in the full-scale nuclear exchange that would follow, the US would suffer 30 to 50 million casualties, tops, but the Russians would be wiped out.  Hurray!  We'd win!  LeMay and his peers were livid that Kennedy was refusing to send troops to Vietnam.

For the past eight years, Bush has forced into retirement those military leaders with an objective approach to fighting "terrorism"; and he has promoted Muslim-hating Christian ideologues who seek a new-age Christian Crusade against the Muslim heretics.[3]

An objective military observer must question the idea of equating "insurgents" with "terrorists":  There has never been even a suggestion that the Taliban were involved in attacks on the US.  The Taliban government of Afghanistan offered to hand over Osama if the US could provide evidence of his guilt.  But the US invaded instead of providing evidence.  In this context, the "insurgents" are, essentially and merely, patriots who oppose the domination of their country by foreign troops.  This is a common view within the Obama administration:

 "Supporters of [Vice-President Joe] Biden's view [that no more troops should be sent] argue that adding more troops would actually make the problem worse, not better, because the Taliban draw support from the fiercely nationalist Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who will mobilize to resist a long-term occupation. 'The real fact is, the more people we put in, the more opposition there will be,' says Selig Harrison, a longtime observer of Afghanistan at the Center for International Policy."  (Rolling Stone[4])

 One need not agree with this view to recognize that it is reasoned and legitimate.[5]  But this viewpoint is not represented in the military that Obama inherited from Bush.  Senior officers with this point of view were forced into retirement under Bush.  And Obama is faced with commanders such as Lt. Gen. David Barno, a "counter-insurgency" advocate who served as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan:  "We're going to be involved in this type of activity in a number of countries for the next 15 to 20 years."  Barno does not just want to wipe out the Taliban.  He wants to expand the conflict to other countries and carry it on for generations.  What does Barno's plan, to kill Afghan patriots, have to do with eliminating "terrorism"? 

And a more terrifying question:  These trained killers from the military currently have the blood of hundreds of thousands of Muslims on their hands.  They have watched at close range as 1000's of young American soldiers have been slaughtered.  How do you suppose they feel about a Black president, born to a Muslim father, trained in Muslim schools, telling them they can't have any more troops for their holy war against Muslims?  "Rabid" seems a likely answer.

I am not the first to see the parallels between Kennedy's and Obama's conflicts with the military.  The first article I saw on this topic was by Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott.[6] Robert Parry has written importantly on the topic.[7]  Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, observed in the Rolling Stone article,⁴ "It's going to take John Kennedy-type courage to turn to his Curtis LeMay and say, 'No, we're not going to bomb Cuba.'  It took a lot of courage on Kennedy's part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military - and do the right thing."  (I must assume that Wilkerson is not familiar with the details of how John Kennedy's conflict with the military ended.  See section 8. below for some of those pertinent details.  There can not be a reasonable doubt that the military killed JFK.)

 

4.  Kennedy sought out military advisors not committed to, or dominated by, the Pentagon:

Obama has done likewise.  The "Jim Jones" from the long quote (in section 2. above), is a familiar figure; that is, he reminds me of the kind of man that Kennedy brought in to advise him.  He is a former Marine general.  He has impeccable "toughness" credentials.  But he is not a Muslim-hating ideologue, out to wage a modern crusade against Islam, to win back the holy land (holy oil?), for Jesus.  So he was forced into retirement by Bush.    But Obama picked him up out of retirement and made him National Security Advisor.  Kennedy had such people in his administration.  Roger Hillsman was a WWII hero, who Kennedy made his undersecretary for South East Asian affairs.  Hillsman looked at Vietnam, and saw what Kennedy saw; and he saw what many observers of Afghanistan see today:

•a.       an utterly corrupt, inept, cowardly, self-interested puppet regime with no constituency among the local people;

•b.      a dedicated, heroic, entrenched opposition with roots 1000 years deep among the locals; and

•c.       an ideology-driven military willing to make ridiculous promises of success, "if only we can get just one more troop increase"; with a nearly unlimited thirst for "insurgent" blood; and with no understanding of the limits of their power. 

 

5.  The military overtly challenged Kennedy's right as commander-in-chief to set policy.  Their treatment of Obama has been similarly outrageous:

Kennedy rejected the military's recommendation for an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; and the military, led by the CIA, went ahead with it anyway. JFK rejected the military's suggestion that the US should overthrow Diem, the president of South Vietnam; the military not only organized Diem's overthrow, they assassinated him.  And of course, for three years Kennedy steadfastly refused their pressure to commit combat troops to Vietnam.  Obama's military has similarly challenged his right to set military policy.

After Obama sent Jim Jones to Afghanistan to let his generals know that they had gotten all the troops they were going to get (as described in section 2. above), Stanley McChrystal began a campaign for more troops that was insubordinate to the point of being illegal.  (The endnote 4 below contains the full story as outlined in Rolling Stone.)  McChrystal responded to Jones' visit and message by writing a demand for 40,000 troops, which he immediately, and illegally, leaked to the press.  The Republican leadership demanded that McChrystal be brought before the Senate to have a national stage for his defiance of Obama's attempts to set policy.  McChrystal went on 60 Minutes to complain that Obama was not listening to him; and then flew into London to publicly call Obama "shortsighted."   Obama flew to Europe and ordered McChrystal to meet with him on his plane.  Two days later, Jim Jones rebuked McChrystal for failing to "follow the chain of command."

But on December 1st, Obama caved in to McChrystal and committed to send an additional 30,000 troops; even though the American public, the Democratic leadership in the Congress, and his closest advisors were overwhelmingly dead set against it.  WTF?!  What happened?  Obama tried, in this speech, to maintain a shred of dignity and authority by saying that the primary role of these troops would be to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people; and he promised that they would begin to head home in 18 months.   Eight days later, he was roundly contradicted on every score, simultaneously, by a quartet of men we ought to regard as his underlings:  Hamid Karzai, the US installed, officially illegitimate "president" of Afghanistan, who owes his position, security, and daily bread to the US, overtly contradicted Obama's statements about the limits of the US commitment, telling a press conference that "Afghanistan's security forces will need U.S. support for another 15 to 20 years."[8]  

On the same podium, on the same day, Robert M. Gates, US Secretary of Defense (and Karzai's apparent puppet master) echoed this same affront to Obama, saying "it will be some time before Afghanistan is able to sustain its security forces entirely on its own ... whether that's 15 or 20 years".⁸   (It should be noted in red letters that Gates was appointed by Bush, and carried over by Obama.)  On the same day, the LA Times reports McChrystal told the Senate, "that the U.S. needed to signal a long-term commitment in Afghanistan".⁸

Such calls for a long term US commitment not only contradict the stated policy of the President, but they are overt provocations to legitimate Afghan nationalists.  They not only undermine official US policy, but they serve the recruiting efforts of the "insurgents"; thereby putting the lives of American soldiers at greater risk; and not only constitute insubordination, but speeches by the military constitute an illegal and anti-democratic attempt by unelected military officials to dictate political policy, a virtual military coup of the President's powers and duties.

 

6.  Both Obama and JFK were faced with overt threats of assassination: 

On November 22, 1963, Dallas was filled with wanted posters calling for Kennedy to be given the death penalty for treason.  The NY Times carried an op-ed on September 29, 2009 talking about the "very dangerous" climate now in America, "the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination."  Four days later, on October 3rd, the Wall Street Journal pointed to three overt physical threats to Obama: a poll on Facebook asking whether the president should be assassinated, a column on a conservative Web site suggesting a military coup is in the works, and Rep. Trent Franks (R., Ariz.) calling Mr. Obama "an enemy of humanity."[9]  

JFK felt, and Obama feels, threatened by the military.  JFK encouraged and assisted Hollywood in the making of "Seven Days in May," a fictional account of a military coup in the US.  Kennedy wanted this story to be told. He thought the American people needed to be alerted to the threat to democracy posed by the military.  No one knows what went on in his head, but it is reasonable to conclude that he felt this was a real and important threat.  Robert Parry has written that Obama had a "'Seven Days In May' moment," meaning that he felt the threat of a military coup, when he began trying to withdraw troops from Iraq. (This is another critically important news article. See endnote 7.)

The Rolling Stone article says that in October, "the Pentagon and top military brass were trying to make the President an offer he couldn't refuse."  Now - "an offer he can't refuse" is a reference to the movie, "The Godfather."  In the movie, the man who receives the "offer he can't refuse" wakes up and finds that the head of his prized horse has been cut off and put in the bed next to him while he was asleep; in order to send the message:  "We are brutal.  We are killers.  We got into your bedroom.  If we had wanted to kill you, we would have.  Next time we will.  If you want to live, don't let there be a next time."  The author of the Rolling Stone article does not have superhuman powers of perception.  But he has written a detailed article on the relations between Obama and his military.  And he has included this suggestion of overt threats of death made to Obama by the military.

And the article goes on:   "They [the generals] wanted the president to escalate the war - go all in by committing 40,000 more troops and another trillion dollars to a Vietnam-like quagmire - or face a full-scale mutiny by his generals."  And what is "a full-scale mutiny"?  It means a coup.  That is what it means, clearly, plainly, and simply.  The perceptive author of this insightful article, Robert Dreyfus, clearly feels that the military wants Obama to feel threatened. 

 

7.  Kennedy was plagued, and Obama is plagued, with a Secret Service that is grossly incompetent 

Kennedy's murder should be proof enough.[10]  The failures of the Secret Service to protect Obama are worse.  At the very least, it can be said in favor of Kennedy's Secret Service that they did not allow the shooters onto the White House grounds.  The incident of the so-called "Party Crashers," has to give Obama pause.  The Salahis, the uninvited guests, the husband and wife team who walked into the White House reception for the Indian Prime Minister, easily penetrated the most high-security affair to take place at the White House in recent memory.  The Indian Prime Minister is regarded as a prime target for Muslim extremists, and everyone present could be considered at great risk from a security lapse.  Whatever else can be said of the Salahis, they presented a starkly clear message to Obama:  "You are not protected.  Your Secret Service is criminally negligent, if not just criminal."

 

8.  Is the military threatening to kill Obama?  The evidence of the involvement of the military in the assassination of JFK is, I think, beyond dispute.[11]

Certainly, this evidence has given every president since Kennedy nightmares about the risks involved in taking on the military.  Kennedy, like Obama, was under fierce pressure to send troops to Vietnam.[12]  And as you will see, the military has taken steps to make Obama feel that his life is in grave danger at their hands.

Vice President Biden, and Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, have both been outspoken in their opposition to sending troops to Afghanistan.  They are both Obama spokesmen.  It may be assumed that at all times they speak for the president.  And yet they spent the 10 months before the President's Dec. 1 speech, undercutting the President's final decision to send troops.[13]  Does that make any sense?  Two weeks before the President's speech, Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan wrote Obama a memo in which he warned against sending troops to support a regime so corrupt that it enjoyed no popular support.  This ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, is a retired Army general and former commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan.  He is one of the not-insane commanders that Bush pushed into retirement; and Obama brought back him back in.  Eikenberry's memo against sending troops was immediately leaked to the press, and showed up on the front pages of the LA Times and NY Times.  There was no outcry from the White House about the leak, suggesting that Obama approved it.   Does that make any sense?  It appears that the President was undercutting his own position, two weeks before taking it?

Pelosi and the other Democratic leaders have taken similar positions as Eikenberry.  They might be accused of pandering to the American people, who are broadly opposed to sending more troops; but it would be unusual for congressional Democratic leaders to undercut their president in this way.  The Bob Woodward article, presented in section 2. above, reveals a President with no plans to send troops, taking steps to confront those military leaders with desires for more troops, and telling them to forget it.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!!  What happened?  Why did Obama suddenly change the position that his spokesmen had been taking for nearly a year; the position that he was promoting, through his ambassador, just two weeks before; that other leading Democrats had been promoting; and that he had stated so forcefully to his commanders in the field?  Why did he suddenly decide to send 30,000 troops to kill and be killed in a cause he knows to be hopeless?

 

This is NOT a small deal.  It can't have been a whimsical decision on his part.  It must have been based on something.  We should be able, then, to look at the events in the news and identify some major occurrence that would cause such a shift.  No?  Let's see.  The central feature behind Biden's and Emmanuel's position was that the Afghan puppet regime was too corrupt to win popular support.[14]  Just recently, the regime proved too corrupt to even stage an election, even after the UN ruled the last election fraudulent and illegitimate.  Could this miserable failure, to stage an election, have changed Obama's mind?  No.  In fact, reports from Afghanistan are that the corruption and incompetence of the puppet regime have only gotten worse.[15]

When you come up with an answer, for any of these questions, I would be very grateful if you would let me know.  Because I don't like my answer.  But here it is:

A military coup, of sorts, has taken place.  This coup, this wresting by force of power from the hands of the President was accomplished in two separate events.

The first event involves the so-called "Party Crashers."  The Salahis managed, not only to enter, but they proceeded to first shake hands with the two most outspoken opponents of sending more troops:  Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel.  And the Salahis then shook hands with Obama himself.  They had gained entrance through the intercession of the Pentagon.[16]  Whether or not they told the President, "Send troops or die", they unquestionably told him, through their actions, "The Secret Service can't, or won't, protect you.  Your life is over when the Pentagon says it's over."  This is not speculation; or interpretation.  It is clear; unequivocal; basic.

But wait!  There's more!  The Rolling Stone article is so much better than the author intended!  I know that he did not mean a "coup" when he wrote that the generals were threatening a "full scale revolt."  I don't think he meant a death threat when he wrote "an offer he couldn't refuse."  And I don't think he grasped the import of this remark.  Even worse, the administration has to take into account the possibility of a terrorist attack, which would allow the GOP to put the blame on the White House. "All it would take is one terrorist attack, vaguely linked to Afghanistan, for the military and his opponents to pounce all over him," says Pillar.

Robert Dreyfuss, the Rolling Stone writer, is saying that Obama caved because of the threat of another "terrorist" attack.  Now.  The suggestion that US military was complicit in the crimes of 9/11 is similar to saying that the Secret Service was complicit in the crashing of the Obama's White House party:  it's indisputable.  The Salahis could not have entered if the White House had the Secret Service not let them in.  Indisputably.  And none of the planes could have hit any of the buildings on 9/11 if the US air defenses had not gone completely to sleep.  The Pentagon attack is particularly egregious.  The official story is that 50 minutes after the 1st plane hit the World Trade Center, US air defenses, on flaming red alert, designed to defend against supersonic missiles and jet fighters, not only failed to stop a slow moving humongous 757, they failed to get off a shot!  Not a single shot in defense of the most highly defended building on the planet.  The following week, Richard Meyers, who was in charge of US air defenses on 9/11, instead of being court-marshaled and shot, as he clearly ought to have been, was promoted, to the highest position in the military:  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.[17]

So the military, under the Bush administration, was indisputably complicit in the events of 9/11, if only by the most jaw-dropping incompetence; incompetence that was warmly rewarded by the Republican White House.  So when the Republican leadership says Obama's attempts to reduce troops and spending in Iraq and Afghanistan threaten to unleash a new terrorist attack, this is a genuine threat from genuine blood-covered terrorists. 

The Fort Hood shooting is this "terrorist" threat made real.  There is much in the story of Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, to suggest that he was a Manchurian Candidate, that he was "programmed," through hypnosis, to do what he did.  Though such a thing can never, by its very nature, be proved.  (If you have ever seen a demonstration by a professional hypnotist, you already know that some people will do anything under hypnosis and that they will have no recollection afterward.)[18]

 

However, there are a number of things about the case of Malik Hasan that are especially persuasive that he was under military control:[19]

•a.       Hasan had at least 13 email contacts with a radical Muslim imam.  The Imam told Al JaZeera that the first of these emails, sent 11 months before the shooting, sought the Imam's approval for Hasan's shooting his fellow soldiers.[20]  Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee's intelligence subcommittee, said that he has confirmed that Hasan wired money to Pakistan.[21]  There has been much discussion in the "news" about the fact that the FBI took no steps to apprehend or otherwise stop Hasan.  But the contents of his emails have not been released.  That is highly suspicious.  Can we conjecture that if the contents were innocuous, that they would have been released?  Sure we can.  The Imam found his house under attack within 24 hours of his publicizing the contents of those emails.  But this discussion is a distraction from the flashing red light:  the FBI did not even open a file on Hasan.  That is not preposterous.  It is very clear in its meaning.  There is only one conceivable explanation, and an obvious one.  If the FBI failed to take steps as basic as opening a file, it is because they were ordered not to do so; by another agency of the federal government.  Again, that is hardly speculative.  It should be basic common knowledge:  if a drug dealer gets picked up by some police agency in possession of a bag full of drugs; and walks out the door, without being arrested, with his bag of drugs, and without a file being opened, it's because he's undercover.  Apparently some agency of the federal government ordered Hasan to send these emails.  That is speculative, but no other explanation will suffice.[22]  And certainly, the FBI was ordered not to open a file.  Of this there cannot be any doubt. 

•b.      Similarly, the FBI's excuse for not opening a file, was that they discovered that Hasan was doing research on the attitudes of Muslims serving in the US military.  How they made this determination, without opening a file, is a mystery to me.  But let that alone for the moment.  For whom was Hasan doing this research?  Duh.  No?  But the attitude of the media to such obvious questions is "don't ask, don't tell."

•c.       Lee Harvey Oswald had been set up by the CIA to appear to be an agent of Fidel Castro.  But the FBI investigated all this evidence and determined that it was a fraud.[23]  So for Hasan to have been set-up in a similar fashion would be par for the course.  Fletcher Prouty (see endnote 12) was tipped off that Kennedy's murder was a military plot by the fact that Oswald's entire bio appeared in the papers in Australia, where Prouty was when he learned of the crime, before Oswald was even charged.   The NY Times and Fox news were spreading the contents of the FBI's non-files / non-investigation, showing Hasan to be an Arab terrorist, while they were still reporting that he was dead, before they knew that he was still alive.  That is, someone on the inside was distributing this insider knowledge about a guy who supposedly was of no interest.  It seems clear as day to me that it was a set-up.

•d.      Now, this is my favorite part.  In the 1944 detective movie, "Double Indemnity," Edward G. Robinson, the detective, is alerted that something foul is going on because the insured dead man had an insurance policy with disability as well as death benefits; but when he broke his leg, he didn't try to use the disability benefits in his policy.  Why didn't he use it?  He must not have known he had an insurance policy.  His wife purchased the policy behind his back, and then killed him.  OK.  Now answer this:  If Obama actually wanted to send troops to Afghanistan; if he actually wanted to move the American people to see the necessity of "fighting terrorism there before it becomes terrorism here"; why did he not wave the bloody shirt from the Fort Hood shooting?  Why did he not claim Hasan to be a terrorist?  Why did he not use him as an example of the continued threat?   Obviously, then, Obama was not part of any plot to kill soldiers at Fort Hood to justify a continued war on "terror." 

 

And now, you do the math.  Add 1 + 1.  Add "Party Crashers" to "programmed shooter" and what do you get?  You get Nancy Pelosi as president. 

 

But things have changed since 1963, haven't they?  The military has matured.  It is not so rabid, blood thirsty, and wild, as it used to be.  They wouldn't overtly threaten to kill the President in this way, would they?  The threats to which Obama caved were political threats, not physical ones.  No?  No.

•a.       Obama is a master politician.  He's not afraid of a political fight.  He is more capable of winning support for his position than any of his opponents.  And besides, the American people are against sending troops, so this is an easy victory.  I don't see how political threats could force him to send young men and women to their deaths, for a cause he and everyone around him know is hopeless.  Counter insurgency in support of a corrupt regime is killing for the sake of killing.

•b.      The military was, at the very least, complicit in the 9-11 murders of 3,000 Americans.

•c.       They were apparently involved in the murder of 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood.

•d.      So, it doesn't seem times have changed for the better. Eisenhower said that the greatest threat to our national security came from what he called "the military industrial complex" in this country; a ruling elite with enormous political power.  These people had the deepest support for Hitler during WWII.  And they orchestrated a performance by the media, the Secret Service, the FBI, the mafia, and the military that murdered JFK; and they have kept the truth suppressed ever since, the ridiculousness of their cover-story not withstanding.  They just passed a $630 billion defense budget, in a world where the primary threat is a few hundred men with hand-held weapons.  What reason is there to think that they would hesitate to kill Obama?  Do you suppose they like having a Black man as President?

 

So.  Perhaps you are convinced that Obama was persuaded, by threats against his life, to send troops.  If so, there is a more terrible question lurking out there.  Were they threatening?  Or were they practicing?  Or both?

 

A "full scale revolt" of the generals does not merely imply the death of Obama.  A military seizure of the government would entail far more deaths than his, certainly many thousands.  President Johnson, in choosing not to pursue Kennedy's killers (no-doubt well known to him), faced a similar choice:  the threat of a full scale revolt - that is, a military coup; civil war, death and prison camps for many thousands, if not millions. But Johnson and Obama are not the only ones confronted with difficult choices.  The information presented here suggests that your democratic government has already been seized.  It is not in the hands of your democratically elected President.  And what are YOU going to do about it, Patriot?  Are you going to be a sheep and a traitor, a collaborator?  Or an insurgent?

 

In our political system, it is virtually a given that all politicians are corrupt.  The politician wants to get elected; so he takes money from thieves; the best do small things to help the people; but they all do what they think they have to to keep the money flowing in.  But people are people.  They occasionally get carried away by an idea, or by the moment, and they get inspired to think that real virtue is possible, even for them.  And for such people, at such times, there are other forms of coercion.  Blackmail, for example.  Further, all politicians know, and the media too, that to admit certain truths means, at least, political death. And on occasion, there is the real murder of an individual who thinks he can, and does, serve the interests of the people.  John Kennedy was such a one.  And such a murder is a great lesson to all the living about the facts of life.  My point is that "coercion with the threat of death" is a real tool used by the ruling elite.  Typically its use is extremely low key, I'm sure.  But on occasion its use may be sufficiently high profile to be identified.  And I think we can see this clearly with Obama.  I believe that the evidence shows that the military has overtly threatened, at the very least, to kill Obama.  I believe they are also, in preparation for the day that he stands up to them, practicing to kill him. 

 

The fact that Obama has refused to waive the bloody shirt from Ft. Hood shows clearly that he did not authorize the shooting.  However, you are likely unaware that the moment the FBI concluded their initial investigation of the Ft. Hood shooting, Obama rejected it out of hand and called William Webster out of retirement to oversee a new investigation.[24]  This has received no attention from any quarter.  And, again, it closely parallels Kennedy:  after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy called Maxwell Taylor out of retirement to supervise the investigation (referred to in endnote 1) of how the invasion occurred when Kennedy had cancelled it.  The investigation lasted two months.  The results were kept secret for twenty years.  Kennedy knew in April that the CIA had betrayed him, launching the Bay of Pigs invasion against his specific orders.  But he didn't fire Dulles until September, six months later.  Obama certainly is aware of the complicity of his intelligence agencies in the Fort Hood shootings.  Whether William Webster's investigation will be as effective as Maxwell Taylor's is impossible to tell.  But Obama is trying to collect the evidence; and he is biding his time.  Which brings us to the "Underwear Bomber."

 

I have been very slow to recognize the Detroit plane "bombing" as a plot of the intelligence agencies.  But the following, entirely suppressed from the media, settles the question, I think. Patrick Kennedy, State Department Under-Secretary for Management testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security on January 27.  His purpose was to explain in detail how it was that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Crotch Bomber, was not put on the no-fly list, despite his father's warnings to the State Department that his son was being recruited by terrorists.  Kennedy testified:

 

"We ask our law enforcement and intelligence community partners, 'Do you have eyes on this person and do you want us to let this person proceed under your surveillance so that you may potentially break a larger plot?'"  He added: "And one of the members [of the intelligence community]-and we'd be glad to give you that out of [open session]-in private-said, 'Please, do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an entire network, not just stop one person.'"[25]

 

Abdulmutallab has not been water-boarded.  His family has been brought in.  At their urging, he is cooperating.  The Republicans are screaming that he shouldn't have a trial.  And the prosecutors are collecting evidence.  What if they succeed in identifying "the entire network"?  What next?  Is anyone paying attention besides Cheney and his network?  Not that I've noticed.

 

Finally - the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed:

 

When Obama was questioned by 9-11 Truthers about the evidence of an inside job, he commented "we need to investigate a whole range of options, although some of the issues you guys have raised I'm not entirely confident are the case."[26]  This is not an endorsement.  But it is as good as anything Ron Paul has said publicly.  And it is far from a condemnation.

 

His decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) in open court in New York City was a brilliantly casual knife to the throat of the perpetrators:  It presents a spotlighted stage, a platform, for the 9-11 Truth movement to demonstrate, raise issues, and bring attention to the glaring facts.  And what better argument could the defense make, that Mohammed was not responsible for the attacks, than to show the jury footage of building 7 coming down in a classic controlled demolition?

 

Thus, the prospect of a public trial for KSM presents Cheney and the other perpetrators with an everything-to-lose situation.  The decision was announced to stage the public trial, and, in the words of Newsweek magazine:  As if on cue, a Nigerian man with explosives in his crotch nearly brought down an American airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, leaving the neocons feeling further vindicated and energized"; and leaving Obama, "mugged by reality," as the neocons themselves put it.[27]  These "energized neocons" are the signatories of the Project for a New American Century, who called for the "new Pearl Harbor" just before the 9-11 attacks; their fingerprints are all over the 9-11 attacks.

 

When Cheney objects to having a public trial for KSM out of one side of his mouth,²⁷ and threatens biological and nuclear attacks out of the other,[28] he must be taken seriously.  And unless Obama feels that he has the cards in his hand to arrest Cheney and his cohorts, what can he do?

 

Late last year, Holder accompanied Obama on a middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base. An Air Force plane had just delivered eighteen bodies of soldiers and Drug Enforcement Administration officials who had been killed that week, in Afghanistan. Holder said that Obama, after seeing a hangar filled with caskets, sat alone in a nearby room. Holder added that he "was struck by the fact that this guy has the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders."[29]

John Hankey is the author of "Dark Legacy:  George Bush and the Murder of John Kennedy," a documentary detailing the evidence linking George Bush Sr. to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  The video is available for free on the web, at BushKilledJFK.com, and at Amazon.com. 

Endnotes:

[1] Kennedy's cancellation of the invasion is not widely known; but it is documented in the US Government publication of the official investigation, a document entitled "Operation Zapata."

 

[2] During the missile crisis, Kennedy's advisors told him that the Russian missiles in Cuba were not armed, and advised an attack and invasion.  It has come out from the Russian side, that the missiles were ready, armed with nuclear warheads, and the local commanders were authorized to use them.  Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense at the time, has made much of this in his book and DVD "The Fog of War."

 

[3] Both Obama's National Security Advisor, Jim Jones, and his Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eichenberry, were pulled by Obama out of retirement, where Bush had forced them. The most egregious case of the promotion of Christian ideologues is that of Lieutenant-General William "Jerry" Boykin, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Intelligence under Bush and a leading figure behind the prisoner abuses in Iraq and at Guantanamo.

 

Writing for the Los Angeles Times on October 16, 2003, columnist William Arkin pointed out that Boykin sees the "war on terror" as a religious war between Judeo-Christian civilization and Satan, with Islam of course cast in the latter role. According to Arkin, Boykin told a religious group in Oregon, in June, that radical Islamists hate the United States "because we're a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian ... and the enemy is a guy named Satan." He continued to say that "our spiritual enemy will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

 

Boykin, a 30-year veteran of the US Army's Delta Force, the Central Intelligence Agency and Army Special Forces, told another audience, in reference to operations he was involved in in Somalia in 1993, that "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Arkin further reports that Boykin believes that President George W. Bush was not elected to the White House by mere mortals, but chosen by God, and that he himself received his orders from God. Arkin also noted that Boykin's concept of "war on terror" is quite different from the way the US president looks at it. Boykin sees it as a war against Muslims.

 

Though most individuals in the military have the common sense not to speak as openly as Boykin did, the entire notion that "insurgents" need to be killed, held by all the leading brass, is fundamentally similar.  That is, upon what basis do we condemn these men to death?  Because they are insurgents against a foreign occupier?  How can that be?  There is a justification that is not stated.  Clearly.  And why not?  Because it is racist, and/or religious.  http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FE11Aa04.html

 

[4] The following are highlights from the Rolling Stone article depicting the efforts by McChrystal to force Obama to implement McChrystal's foreign policy, rather than Obama's:  http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30493567/the_generals_revolt

 

The military's campaign to force Obama's hand started in earnest in September, when the Commander's Initial Assessment of the war - a highly classified report prepared by McChrystal - was leaked to The Washington Post. ...  In the report, McChrystal paints a dire picture of the American effort in Afghanistan, concluding that a massive increase in troop levels is the only way to prevent a humiliating failure.

 

On Capitol Hill, hawkish GOP congressmen seized the opening to turn up the heat on Obama by demanding that he allow McChrystal and Petraeus to come to Washington to testify at high-profile hearings to ask for more troops. "It is time to listen to our commanders on the ground, not the ever-changing political winds whispering defeat in Washington," declared Sen. Kit Bond, a Republican from Missouri. Attempting to usurp Obama's authority as commander in chief, Sen. John McCain introduced an amendment to compel the two generals to come before Congress, but the measure was voted down by the Democratic majority.

 

As the pressure from the military and the right built, McChrystal went on 60 Minutes to complain that he had only talked to Obama once since his appointment in June. Then, upping the ante, the general flew to London for a speech, where he was asked if de-escalating the war, along the lines reportedly suggested by Vice President Joe Biden, might work. "The short answer is: no," said McChrystal, dismissing the idea as "shortsighted." His comment - which bluntly defied the American tradition that a military officer's job is to carry out policy, not make it - shocked political observers in Washington and reportedly angered the White House.  ... 

 

For his part, Obama moved quickly to handle the insurrection. One day after McChrystal's defiant London speech, the president unexpectedly summoned the general to a one-on-one meeting aboard an idling Air Force One in Copenhagen. No details of the discussion were released, but two days later Jim Jones, the retired Marine general who now serves as Obama's national-security adviser, publicly rebuked McChrystal, declaring that it is "better for military advice to come up through the chain of command."

 

[5] Eichenberry, 18 days before Obama's Dec. 1 speech announcing 30,000 more troops, wrote a memo to Obama urging him not to send Americans to die defending a regime as utterly corrupt and worthless as the puppet regime in Afghanistan.  http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-obama-afghan12-2009nov12,0,2561752.story

 

[6] P.D. Scott:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15752

 

[7] Robert Perry says the same things have happened to Obama's stated plans to withdraw from Iraq.  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/022009.html

 

[8] LA Times,12/9/09  http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-afghan-mcchrystal9-2009dec09,0,224382.story

 

[9] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125452861657560895.html

 

[10] The secret service manual requires the planners of a motorcade to pour on extra protection when there is a sharp turn in the route, which requires that the car slow down.  Agents should, therefore, have been positioned all over Dealey Plaza to insure that there were no open windows.  That is standard procedure.  Instead, there were no secret service agents at all on the ground in Dealey Plaza.  The protective motorcycle escort was ordered to stay behind the President's vehicle.  The limo is equipped with handles on the rear trunk lid, and steps built into the bumper, to accommodate agents riding on the back.  The agents were waived off this position and moved into a following car.  The driver should have stepped on the gas when the first shot was fired.  Instead, the driver braked and slowed, for the next 6 seconds.  Only after Kennedy was shot in the head did the driver take off.

 

[11] I've spent 40 years researching, and 10 years making a documentary that makes this point in spades.  (I'll gladly provide you with a copy.  It is available on Amazon if you'd like to read the reviews.)  In the video, you will see a video interview with Aubrey Rike, the man who loaded Kennedy's body into a bronze casket.  You will also see a video interview with Paul O'Neil, the Bethesda Naval Hospital sailor who unloaded the body from a grey shipping casket, 20 minutes before the bronze casket arrived at the facility.  An FBI memo, shown in a section of the video narrated by Walter Cronkite, says that it was obvious that Kennedy's wounds had been altered.  Pre-autopsy photos also show this mutilation of the body.  And one of the doctors from the Dallas emergency room, in an excerpt from a NOVA special, points to an autopsy photo of the entrance wound on Kennedy's right temple and says that the photos show it was altered before the autopsy began.

 

The military had complete control of the body and the autopsy.  They, and no one else, altered the critical head wound.  This was an entrance wound to Kennedy's right temple.  It was fired from the so-called "grassy knoll."  It exited the back leaving a gaping 4-inch hole in the rear of Kennedy's head.  The wound to Kennedy's temple was altered to disguise its characteristic appearance as an entrance wound.  But the alterations were done at least 5 hours before Oswald was charged.  The autopsy room was full of admirals and generals.  These men were acting as part of the conspiracy to murder.  There is no room for reasonable debate on any of these points.

 

[12] The movie "JFK" does an amazing job of making this point.  The movie presents a "Mr. X."  This is not a fictional character.  The man's name was Fletcher Prouty.  He was the Pentagon liaison to the CIA.  And he was deeply and directly involved, as shown in the movie, in the dual efforts of JFK both to eliminate the CIA, and to withdraw from Vietnam.

 

[13] Biden:  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/09/biden-begs-obama-no-more-troops-to-afghanistan.html

Emanuel:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/asia/19afghan.html

Eikenberry: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-obama-afghan12-2009nov12,0,2561752.story

 

[14] You can NOT win a war against an insurgency that is more popular than you.  You can go on fighting forever, which is what the generals have stated is their anticipated outcome.  But you can not win a peace without a government that is popularly supported.

 

[15] In fact, conditions in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate.  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091211/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan, Dec. 11, 2009.  Top UN official in Afghanistan to leave in March, Gareth Price, head of the Asia program at Chatham House, a think tank in London, said "it's clear now that the Afghan government isn't working."

 

[16] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113004420_pf.html.  "People familiar with the inquiry into how the Salahis were able to attend Tuesday's gala, even though they weren't on the official guest list, said the Salahis exchanged e-mails with Michele S. Jones, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon-based liaison to the White House. It was unclear how well the Salahis know Jones, but Jones includes the Salahis' lawyer, Paul W. Gardner, as one of her 50 friends on Facebook.

 

[17] My favorite is a lecture given by a physics professor, Steven Jones.  Jones was a tenured, admired physics professor at Brigham Young University.  Jones is a devout and conservative Christian and Mormon.  He voted for Bush.  But his physics students asked him to explain the collapse of the buildings at the World Trade Center, particularly building 7.  He enthusiastically approached the question as a teachable moment.  At first he approached the question as one of basic physics:  "Can the heat from jet fuel and office supplies explain the collapse of a steel structure?"  He concluded, with enormous anguish, that it cannot.  He was tortured by the implications for many months.  And then he woke up one morning and remembered that he was a leading expert, on a world-class level, at chemical analysis.  (The first time I googled his name, his published papers on his techniques for determining the chemical content of crystalline structures is what came up first.)  And, having determined that the official story of airplanes and jet fuel could not account for the collapse of the buildings, he determined to use his expertise to analyze samples of dust from the World Trade Center to search for evidence of what did, in fact, bring down the buildings.  He found abundant evidence (metallic microspheres) of steel having been evaporated (such tiny microspheres are created when steel is evaporated) and also abundant samples of the military grade demolition explosive, thermite.  Thermite is virtually the only way that steel can be heated to sufficiently high temperatures that it evaporates.  But I have several other DVD's besides the one by Professor Jones.  All of this information, including the videos, is available online.

 

[18] The assassin of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, is the best example, since his case was the most thoroughly examined.  The papers splashed the idea of his being a radical West-hating Palestinian across the front page.  But Sirhan was a Christian.  He and his family liked the Kennedys.  He had no recollection of the shooting.  And every eye-witness says that his gun never got within 3 feet of Kennedy's front, while Kennedy had powder burns on the back of his head, which the coroner said were left by a shot from not more than 1 inch.  Photographs showing CIA operatives, known Kennedy haters, around the Biltmore hotel that night, have been recently uncovered.

 

The shooters of John Lennon, George Wallace, and Ronald Reagan fit similar profiles, but their cases have not been so carefully investigated.

 

The CIA spent 30 years researching hypnotism, but they learned nothing and there are no files.  As I said, if you've ever seen a hypnotist at work, you will see that some people under hypnosis can be made to do anything.  But not everyone is susceptible.  Sirhan was hypnotized by court appointed psychiatrists.  He was demonstrably susceptible. 

 

[19] The link will take you to a stunning report on the shooter from the NY Times.  You have to read through to the end to get to the most amazing quotes from his neighbors.  He was, apparently, a friendly, lovable guy.  The tenants generally saw him leave early and come home late in the afternoon, usually in his fatigues. He never had visitors, they said, but he was friendly with his neighbors.  "The first day he moved in, he offered to give me a ride to work," said Willie Bell, 51, who lived next door. "He'd give you the shoes and shirt and pants off him if you need it. Nicest guy you'd want to meet.  (Boy!  You sure don't find that quote in the headlines.)  "The very first day I seen him, he hugged me like, 'My brother, how you doing?'"  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/us/09reconstruct.html?scp=3&sq=%22Why%20the%20War%20on%20Terror%20Is%20a%20War%20on%20Islam%22&st=cse

 

[20] http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=9410718.  "Fort Hood: Hasan Asked Awlaki If It Was Okay to Kill American Soldiers"   Please note that this is ABC news online.  This story has been utterly suppressed.  It was never broadcast by ABC, or carried by any major newspaper.  Within 24 hours of the publication of this report, Awlaki's home was bombed by Yemeni war planes.  You didn't know Yemen had an air force? 

 

[21] http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/111309dnentcharges.4179b70.html.  "I have confirmed through independent sources that there were communications and wire transfers made to Pakistan," McCaul said in a prepared statement provided by his spokesman. "This Pakistan connection just raises more red flags about this case and demonstrates why it's important for Congress to exercise its oversight authority."

 

[22] Curiouser and curiouser.  Obama ordered the FBI to investigate themselves to determine "whiskey tango foxtrot" they were doing in this case.  And the day they finished their investigation, he ordered them to do it again, only this time with outside supervision.  Immediately after the shooting, Obama ordered a total clampdown on leaks of information about the case.  There is clearly much more going on here than meets the eye:  http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-fort-hood9-2009dec09,0,399074.story

 

[23] John Connally, who is implicated in the JFK assassination, called LBJ to urge him to pursue this avenue in order to justify an invasion of Cuba.  The call was recorded and is available on line both in transcript and audio form.  The CIA claimed to have a photo of Oswald visiting the Cuban embassy.  But the photo does not remotely resemble Oswald, and the FBI investigation says Oswald was elsewhere at the time.  Further, Oswald's representation of himself as a member of the genuine pro-Castro "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" (FPCC) proved to be a complete fraud.  He was the only "member" of his local chapter.  He set it up without authorization from the actual FPCC.  The address he used on his leaflets for the FPCC was that of a CIA office run by the former head of the Chicago FBI, Guy Bannister.

 

[24] http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-fort-hood9-2009dec09,0,399074.story

 

[25] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/f253-f03.shtml

 

[26] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWta99fesPw&NR=1

 

[27] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/15/100215fa_fact_mayer.  This is an excellent and thorough description of the Obama administration's and Eric Holder's process in deciding to bring the case to trial.  It also describes the bloody threats of the neocons, led by Cheney's daughter, against the people of the city of New York, should the trial go forward.

 

[28] http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/dick-cheney-vice-president-joe-biden-square-off/story?id=9839602.  Cheney:  "I think, in fact, the situation with respect to al Qaeda to say that, you know, that was a big attack we had on 9/11, but it's not likely again, I just think that's dead wrong," the former VP said on "This Week. "I think the biggest strategic threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind, and I think al Qaeda is out there even as we meet trying to figure out how to do that."

 

[29] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/15/100215fa_fact_mayer

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As Rich Benjamin of Alternet notes, Joe Stack's "suicide screed chafes and exposes a raw wound this country does not know what to do with." Bingo.

In the same week as Stack's rampage, an Ohio man so enraged about his home being foreclosed upon, even though he owes far less on it than it's worth, bulldozed the house so that the bank would not be able to repossess it. Not unlike Stack, Terry Hoskins was trying to cope with business debts as well as a lawsuit, and vehemently demonstrated his rage toward banks for all the world to see.

It doesn't take Patrick Jane, "The Mentalist" or Allison DuBois, "The Medium", to grasp that these eruptions of vitriolic rage are most likely, previews of massive civil unrest worldwide, as individuals and families awaken to the current ghastly global transfer of wealth, so brilliantly exposed in David DeGraw's "The Economic Elite Have Engineered An Extraordinary Coup"-a wealth transfer of mindboggling proportions that has left the middle class impoverished and writhing in despair. But this particular side of the Toxic Triangle-economic meltdown, along with the other two sides, climate chaos, and planetary energy depletion, signals that the human species has entered, not a long and painful recession, but nothing less than a tipping point in its own evolutionary odyssey.

And now, millions of human beings who for at least a decade have been unwilling to look deeply at how their world works, find themselves depressed, enraged, paralyzed, and terrified at best and suicidal and homicidal at worst. Since before the turn of the 20^th century, many courageous researchers who were willing to look deeper gave us extraordinary "maps" of who was running the world and what the consequences of that reality would be-individuals like Mike Ruppert, Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, Peter Dale Scott, Colin Campbell, Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Cynthia McKinney, Sibel Edmonds, and many more. They produced volumes of research related to the Triple Crisis/Toxic Triangle which for the most part, fell on deaf ears.

The corporate capitalist system had forced on American families a lifestyle that left them too busy and too strapped with debt-and of course, too hypnotically entranced with the proverbial "American dream", to read the signals that were becoming more ominous by the day. Besides, in the pubescent ecstasy of the earning/spending/debt party, who wants to be annoyed with downers like becoming an adult and comprehending the facts and their consequences?

And so, those who were too busy, ambitious, hard-working, conscientious, dedicated, and of course, let us not forget, patriotic, have within the past two years been blindsided by that which they refused to acknowledge--and worse, they who have called the mapmakers and their supporters, such as myself, "whack jobs, wing nuts, conspiracy theorists, fearmongers, and pessimists" now find themselves bewildered, flabbergasted, dumbfounded, and horrified.

Tragically, it's the result of being uninformed and unprepared, and when the excrement hits the circular air mechanism, it results for the unprepared in becoming unplugged-like Joe Stack and Terry Hoskins.

But Terry and Joe are only two cases in point. Apparently, the United States government (not Patrick Jane or Allison DuBois) is anticipating many more such incidents. In December, 2008, the Phoenix Business Journal reported in a story entitled "Arizona Police Say They Are Prepared As War College Warns Military Must Prep For Unrest; IMF Warns of Economic Riots" that "a new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks." Concurrently, Military.Com cited another part of the report which stated that "Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities ... to defend basic domestic order and human security, likewise in the case of 'unforeseen economic collapse', 'pervasive public health emergencies,' and 'catastrophic natural and human disasters,' among other possible crises."

Fortunately, many individuals and families have awoken to the reality that what our species is confronting is nothing less than the total collapse of industrial civilization and the end of the world as we have known it. They are coming to understand that the collapse is a process, not an event, and that some aspects of it will be slow and grinding, while other aspects will be sudden, catastrophic, and traumatic. And very importantly, they are becoming prepared.

But how does one "prepare", and what is preparation anyway?

In my experience, there are three aspects. The first concerns individual and family self-sufficiency which relates to things like learning to grow one's own food, learning to store and preserve food, understanding and utilizing permaculture design principles in all aspects of life; deeply evaluating one's living situation and assessing where the most sustainable living venue might be; completely extricating oneself from the debt/credit system; learning natural, holistic healing techniques and wild, edible plant foraging skills. These are only a few of the most basic forms of logistical preparation.

And please note, this is not about becoming a camo-clad survivalist with years of food and water stored underground and protected by an arsenal of weapons. In fact, the reality of our predicament is that the lone survivalist/"apocalypse man" is precariously at risk because survival demands cooperation and coordination.

Therefore, the second aspect of preparation relates to neighborhood and community cooperation, and I believe that the Transition Handbook and Transition movement worldwide offer the most practical, sensible, and feasible model for creating local resilience and self-sufficiency. Those who are skeptical of community preparation often argue that a burgeoning police state will not allow such communities to exist let alone thrive. What they tend to overlook are the realities of energy depletion and economic unraveling which are likely to seriously curtail the functioning of all levels of law enforcement worldwide.

Finally, but in my opinion, most fundamental, is emotional and spiritual preparation for the unprecedented changes which have already begun and which will continue and intensify for many decades to come. It is perhaps the best hedge against becoming "unplugged" in the face of mindboggling chaos and transition. For this reason I published in 2009 Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse--a poetic manual of emotional and spiritual preparation for navigating the daunting challenges of our uncertain future.

Although I do not condone Joe Stack's violent attack on the Austin IRS office, I find that his articulate suicide letter contains many grains of truth, as well as a tragic exposé of his lack of comprehension of the larger transition that inundated his life with an overwhelming number of smaller ones. Myriad forms of preparation are no guarantee of survival or well being in the face of the end of the world as we have known it, but they may allow us unimaginable opportunities for personal and community transformation.

In addition to the Transition Handbook, I strongly recommend the Post-Peak Living website and its online "Uncrash Course", as well as my upcoming course in April, 2010 on "Navigating The Coming Chaos". For further information on the latter course, please contact me at Carolyn@carolynbaker.netThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

No one needs to be either unprepared or unplugged. But the time to address both issues is now.

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I have lived with a pack for almost 20 years. I can say with certainty that they have a life of their own. The dynamics of relationships among the dogs are fascinating and they fit their pack life and responsibilities around our human doings. The dogs within the pack all have their own responsibilities from who watches the door and warns of intruders to who "relay" barks, to who has perimeter duty. In packs which howl, there is the one who starts the howl and who ends it. The order of the pack and who has what rights in what area is made by some determination of their own.

In relationship to the human members, they each have their own relationship, but there is a pack influence that is clearly evident. Who is responsible for keeping an eye on what member. Who follows and who watches. While we humans are officially in charge, there is only so much intervention into the actual day to day functioning of the canine members that is effective. In my experience, determining who has what job is not a human's to determine.

When a member of the pack is lost, it is crushing for the entire pack. The loss is felt on many levels, and they grieve. This is not anthropomorphism on my part. I have watched that grieving process too many times. While each dog expresses their loss in their own way, it is clear that they mourn the loss in an emotional way. Their process is also much different in some ways that human grieving. I believe this is because their sense of smell plays such a big part in their lives. When they smell the missing pack member, it reignites the hope they will reappear. It also reignites the sense of loss.

I am writing this now because we have lost two members of our pack in a short period of time. While the loss of these two close companions is huge, so is the potential loss of the pack continuity.

We spay and neuter our dogs, so our dogs do not reproduce. However, they do pass on the pack knowledge and (dare I say) culture. Our most current pack was Ben and Grady's pack. We have had dogs come into this pack. First Aerie, and then for a period of time Maddy and Buddy who eventually moved to Seattle. But Ben and Grady moved from becoming two dogs as part of the household to a pack when Aerie came to us. Sadly, she died an untimely death due to being poisoned.

What had been forged with Aerie was a pack. I don;t know that I can explain the transformation even though I lived through it. With Aerie's entrance into the family the whole dynamic among the dogs changed. The relationships became much more complex and richer in some ways. Their relationship to the human members of the pack also changed in more subtle ways. Humans calculated into their lives in a different way. They became more emotionally complete and balanced somehow. When Aerie died, the "pack" component remained, but it was clear that the balance was wrong.

By the spring after Aerie's death two pups - Crow and Fox - came to join Ben and Grady. They trained those pups to be dogs, but they also formed a complex pack with a rich life that we were honored to be a part of. As they started reaching adolescence, Ben and Grady went from being a pack with pups for who they were surrogate parents (a task Grady definitely did not like) to a rebalanced pack again.

First, Ben passed and the pack went on with Grady essentially taking on full pack leadership. One of the most amazing things was Ben's passing. He had seriously injured himself and could not stand any longer. Grady, Fox, and Crow all kept a close eye on him. Each would check on him. Crow took a tennis ball down and carefully placed it within his reach (Ben was an avid ball player). It was one of the most touching things I have ever seen.

When Grady passed, Fox and Crow were adrift. They clearly carried the social "mark" of Ben and Grady, but they were a pack missing something. Neither had ever had to be "in charge" and they leaned on each other heavily. The following summer Cody joined us. He raised his share of hell in terms of how things were supposed to work He was nine months old and not a malleable puppy. However, over time things settled down and Cody took his place in the pack and learned our pack's rules. He was a "pushy" dog and He and Fox came to a compromise. Fox was in charge outside and Cody was in charge inside. Crow of course refused to acknowledge either of them being in charge and was the real leader of the pack.

Cody was the anchor of the next generation of our pack which started with Ben and Grady. Then, on December 31, 2009, we lost Cody to a hemangiosarcoma. There was nothing to be done. Crow and Fox were stunned and bereft, and so were we. We had not just lost a dear companion, but now the future existence of this pack was at risk. We had been keeping an eye open for another pack member before Cody's death. We now started looking more closely, but no likely dog presented him or herself.

Then, just as we were starting to adjust to the loss of Cody, we got hit with another loss. Our dear Crow went into massive convulsions which were caused either by a brain tumor or pancreatic cancer. The prognosis was more than grim for even a short term (week or two) improvement, and virtually no hope beyond that. So we gave her back to the universe. This loss was devastating on so many levels. It was devastating as the loss of a dear companion, particularly following on the loss of our Cosmic Clown Cody. It was a devastating loss to Fox who had now lost his entire pack, but also his sister from whom he had never been separated. It was also the loss of a significant part of the pack's knowledge.

With the loss of both Cody and Crow, all of the pack's responsibilities fell on Fox. He was now a pack leader without a pack - they had all been ripped from him. He was not just a dog alone. He was a grieving one dog pack. His response, and our own loss, was tearing us all apart.

We checked the Humane Society site for the 100th time, and there was a dog who had that certain look in her eye. So we immediately loaded Fox into the car and headed off to the shelter. Upon arrival, we said that we wanted to meet "Missy." We met her and she seemed a sweet and calm creature, so we asked to have Fox meet her. The meeting went better than we ever expected. It seemed that they could become friends so we adopted her and brought her home. She and Fox are still figuring each other out, and "Missy", who we have renamed Mossy, is trying to adapt to living in this new home.

We are not sure what will happen from here. We do not know if Mossy will learn the pack knowledge. We will likely be getting another member once Mossy is secure and settled in and Fox feels more confident with her. Our pack - Ben and Grady's pack - is still at risk of "dying." That will only magnify the loss.

The dying out of a pack is like the dying out of a tribe. Once it is gone, it is gone - forever. You can build a new pack, but it will be another pack. While over the years, as members come into and leave the pack the individual personalities leave their stamp, there is a certain "feel" to the pack. I can't explain it.

For now, we grieve the losses and cling to each other (human and canine) to find what comfort we can. We hold hope for a firm bonding of Mossy into our lives, our hearts, and our pack.

The founders of our current pack Ben and Grady. Ben is the German Shepherd, and Grady a dingo and border collie cross.

Ben (right) and Grady were joined by Aerie (left).

Grady, Fox and Crow.

Cody

Fox (foreground) with Crow and Rowan.

Sir Fox

Mossy on her first night in her new home.

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I have been especially disappointed with their lack of interest in reforming the American political system through a third political party. Sometimes tea party people say they are fed up with both major parties, but they keep supporting Republicans. As if this will put people in Congress who would actually act as independents and work courageously to enact true, deep reforms. Call my cynical, but I doubt whether people like Senator Scott Brown will resist pressures to be loyal Republicans no matter how extensively they avoid calling themselves Republicans in their campaigns. Sadly, the tea party movement is a blow to third parties, particularly the Libertarian Party that has struggled for many years. Could some very clever people be using this movement to strengthen the Republican Party rather than transform the political system? If so, then most of the tea party crowd have been conned and deceived.

Second, I am nauseated by the noxious negative views about President Obama, even though I did not support or vote for him. Attacks on his citizenship, calls for his impeachment, and labeling him a Marxist seem thinly disguised tactics hiding racism and not an accurate understanding of the facts about him and his policies. To simplify, for example, getting the nation out of the Great Recession requires massive government spending to reboot the economy, a plain fact that virtually every economist over the entire political spectrum recognizes. It does not represent socialist or Marxist principles. Yes, there should have been more spending on directly helping people and small businesses rather than the financial sector, but this does not invalidate massive government spending.

Third, the pervasive support for smaller federal government and so many other openly expressed platitudes reveal inconsistencies and outright hypocrisy about what tea party zealots are willing to do to show their true beliefs. I want to see these people proudly professing their commitment to stop participating in social security and Medicare; stop using public schools for their children; stop taking unemployment payments or support for job training; stop using local police and fire departments and public libraries. I want to hear far more support for necessary government functions. Less government does not necessarily equate to better government.

With critical thinking tea party zealots must recognize that it was not excessive government action that caused the Great Recession, bur rather too little government action to stem the greedy actions among banks and other financial institutions. The core problem is not excessive government but corruption of government by private sector corporate and other special interests. Yet I hear very little from this crowd about the exact means they would use to eliminate pervasive corruption of the two-party plutocracy. Their glib talk about freedom and regard for the Constitution is not supported by more than empty rhetoric.

I would have much more respect for this movement if it embraced the nonpartisan effort by Friends of the Article V Convention at foavc.org to make Congress obey the Constitution and give us what the Founders believed would be a necessary option: An Article V Convention of state delegates that could propose constitutional amendments, true reforms that the corrupt Congress will never propose. Without this there are a whole lot of constitutional hypocrites.

Fourth, passionate support for Sarah Palin is appalling. There is no rational basis for such support based on her beliefs, actions and policy positions. She is a blatant numbskull and intellectual midget with damn good looks and speaking skills, but to make her a political leader is disgraceful.

In sum, it is heartening to see so many Americans with genuine anger, frustration and disgust about American politics and government. I share these feelings. Great motivation, but what it is producing seems little more than an avenue for racist views and desire to strengthen the Republican Party, which when it had considerable political power did far more to advance corporate interests and the wealthy than helping ordinary Americans.

We need a populist Second American Revolution. Populism yes; Republicans and Democrats NO! Recognize this or die still waiting for the change you have been waiting for and suffering with a delusional democracy. See the Article V convention option as the constitutionally provided populist path to true reforms. Demand that candidates openly support making Congress obey the Constitution and give us the first Article V convention. An Article V convention would be the way to have a meaningful tea party that honored our Founders.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com; he is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention and former chair of the Independent Party of Maryland.]

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Free of delusion I have come to this sad reality: Once upon a time Americans could confidently believe that their nation was on the right track, getting better, offering most citizens a decent chance of living securely and proudly. Now, that view has been smashed by many years of undeniable evidence that our political system is frighteningly corrupt by forces that have ensured an economy serving the interests of the rich and powerful. Their pursuit of happiness enslaves ordinary Americans. America's middle class is a disappearing and suffering set of distracted victims, slipping continually into the lower class of an inevitable two-class system. Most are oblivious to their fate, to the electoral tyranny that manipulates and consumes them as fuel to keep the corpocracy humming.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was right about the past decade: "It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true. ... the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing." Do you think children noticed?

The decade of numerical zeros was also the decade of nothing. Nothing, as in not having a home anymore, not having enough money for food, not having health insurance, not having a decent job anymore, not having the friend or relative that lost their life in Iraq or Afghanistan, not having money and financial security for retirement and old age, not having any more illusions about politicians like President Obama who sell themselves as agents of change and reform but end up like all the other lying plutocracy-serving political hacks, only this time hiding behind blackness. But learning nothing is even worse than having and achieving nothing. Worse, because nothing is likely to stop the slide into slime. Nothing promised by Democrats or Republicans is likely to revive the American Dream, now replaced by the American Disappointment.

Tyranny can prosper along with elections and even freedom. That should have been a lesson learned by the many millions of Americans victimized by corporations and dysfunctional government agencies that did nothing to protect them from the greed, incompetence and criminality that savaged them. What is even more inscrutable is that we do not see Americans rising up in righteous, populist anger and discontent to tear down the system killing them. Why is there such stability in a system so corrupt, disgraceful and unjust?

This is the great mystery that defines the American Disappointment. A country founded on revolution so sick it cannot see the need to use it again against domestic, elected tyranny.

Our Constitution provides the path to a peaceful Second American Revolution, yet Americans do not even get excited when they hear that Congress has refused to obey the Constitution and the option in Article V for a convention of state delegates that could propose constitutional amendments. An option put there by the Founders because they anticipated the day when citizens would lose trust in the government. Nor do they become enraged when it is pointed out that Congress flagrantly disobeys the Constitution and their oath of office because they fear constitutional amendments that could truly reform the political system, ones that they would never propose. The nation is filled with constitutional hypocrites more than willing to ignore a piece of their beloved Constitution that Congress refuses to honor. As if it does not matter. Just the supreme law of the land and the rule of law smashed with the invisible fist of ignorance. By itself, enough for a revolution, once upon a time.

Wait, perhaps all this grief over my country does not really matter. After all, in about a hundred years there will be a whole new set of Americans. Maybe they will be in an even more devastated condition than today. Then, finally, the revolution may appear. Wish I could be there. Wish you could be there.

Here's a resolution for the New Year: As a US citizen I will act responsibly and do everything I can to get strong reforms of our political and government system. Start with becoming a member of Friends of the Article V Convention at foavc.org.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com]

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Though he certainly inherited a terrible economy from the Bush administration, he has steadfastly pursued the same policies (and with the same characters) to address terrible things about the national economy as well as the banking, financial and housing sectors that one would expect from someone too concerned about corporate interests rather than the needs of most Americans. All the billions of dollars pumped into business sectors has done next to nothing to stop the awful, continuing unemployment situation that has become yet another nail in the coffin of the middle class. The many greedy people on Wall Street that sunk the national and global economies have not been punished, but still hold on to their huge wealth. Obama has made a mockery of the rule of law with his infantile "I want to look forward, not backward" philosophy. Justice cannot be obtained other than by looking back and prosecuting the lawbreakers.

At a time when there are historic levels of Americans unable to buy enough food and, therefore, increasingly dependent on government food stamps or charity food banks and pantries, and millions more are losing their homes and going homeless, and still more millions unable to access affordable health care, President Obama is still pursuing the obscenely costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To waste American lives and ignore enormous domestic economic needs in pursuit of imperialistic wars is insultingly shameful. This kind of behavior would have been totally expected from a Republican president. No reasonable American should ever condone such behavior that continues to put the nation in long term financial peril that will surely negatively impact the lives of Americans for many decades to come.

Third, Obama's performance on health care reform has been abysmal. Rather than show genuine leadership, he left if up to the corporate-controlled House and Senate to create highly delusional and deceptive health care reform bills. What the country needed was a president that was a champion for a single-payer universal health care system. Instead, what we will surely get is a bill that Obama will happily sign and then declare victory even though very few Americans will see lower costs, better insurance coverage, more affordable access to health care or the freedom to get into a first-rate government program.

In sum, Obama's policies and tactics are killing Americans, not metaphorically but literally. For these reasons alone, Americans should make it clear that they have lost confidence in President Obama. He needs to see that the vast majority of Americans are suffering too much in so many ways that he needs to make a sharp turn in his policies, programs and staff. Better to be a really good, historic one-term president than a losing two-termer. Giving up a second term would take courage, and courage is what President Obama needs to work for ordinary Americans, not the rich and powerful ones that continue to benefit from this administration like prior Republican ones.

Time for more Americans to stop succumbing to Obama's slick talk and promises and start demanding very loudly that their government work more aggressively to fix the burdens hitting at least a third of the population. Our current domestic conditions are so dire that if history provided any appropriate message, then President Obama should be made to see that the radical, revolutionary talk coming mostly from the right will surely become shared by the larger fraction of suffering Americans seeing themselves as liberals, independents and progressives. The time for revolution is now. Will it be peaceful or violent? That is what our political leaders (with their full stomachs, nice homes, secure income and great health care insurance) should be made to stay awake at night thinking about.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com]

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Palestine as the centre

When I first started my research/reviews, it quickly became apparent that Palestine was not only a metaphorical centre for the problems of many of the peoples of the world, but it is also the reality of much of the political-military manoeuvring that continues not only in the Middle East, but throughout the world, as the demands for resource control and market control begins shifting from west to east. Yet it is easy to lose site of the situation in Palestine.

The western media is staunchly on the side of the Israeli powers, and what little reaches publication provides the Benny Morris version of events in which Israel is the victim of Palestinian intransigence and fundamentalist terror rather than Palestine as the victim of an internationally illegal occupation, an internationally illegal wall, and various internationally illegal acts of war and suppression and a Jewish fundamentalism that allows no citizens other than its one ethnic cadre with Eretz Israel.

Western governments for the most part, particularly the U.S. with its Canadian partner in crime, follow the Israeli line without question or opposition, blindly reciting the common rhetoric of 'terror' and more terror. Great Britain and the U.S. conspired against Iraq, as they did with Iran under Mossadegh in 1953, as they did in Afghanistan on into Pakistan, and as they are doing with Iran now. The real terror is that disseminated by the occupiers.

More media

Returning to the media there are other problems. First is that of the compartmentalization of news items such that all these problems seem disparate and unrelated, horrible or terrible or scary, but not necessarily related. Accompanying this is the seemingly trivialization of these problems, reduced s they are to ten second sound bites that create captivating headlines but little weight of substance - in general a lack of thought, depth and wisdom. Even the documentary shows while adding more information, still attempt "balance" - the downfall of journalism - as true journalism should advocate a position based on total sums of information, accepting a perspective that evidence - rather than hearsay or meaningless rhetoric or mythological beliefs - supports.

Another problem with media is its tie ins with the corporate world and the constant barrage of advertising combined with dim-witted shows created for an audience that is not educated (and continuing to slip within the OECD education rankings) for anything more meaningful. The U.S. denigrates propaganda in all its forms within other countries, yet cleverly incorporates its propaganda into the daily life and routines of its citizens from the moment they can watch television and activate a computer. It is called advertising, consumption, saving while buying (an obvious contradiction in terms that everyone seems to accept), everything that is required to keep the populace happy, placated, and docile while the elite rampage through the world harnessing as much of its wealth as possible.

It is this same media that trivializes global warming as a matter of carbon emissions from cars and a few too many power plants without recognizing the gross consumptive habits of the west that requires more than our own planet for sustainability - unfortunately we only have one that is accessible to us. It is the irony of a magazine sponsoring a contest on 'going green', with part of the reward being more air miles. It trivializes the plight of the poor by telling us all that the recession is over...well, almost over...we need to all adjust to a new standard...that the poor need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

The great black hope

President Obama mesmerized enough voters to gain control of the helm of the ship of state in 2009, a ship of state fuelled by 'hope,' 'change,' 'audacity,' and a 'yes we can' attitude. All very nice, all very vague, all resulting in the ship of state barging its blind way through all aspects of troubled waters.

Obama's most recent trip to the Asia-Pacific congress highlighted the diminished status of the U.S. in the region. Attending more as a supplicant than a leader, more of a follower than a leader, Obama still tried his wonderful rhetoric about cooperation and improving humanities plight, rhetoric aimed probably more at the U.S. domestic market than at the Asian countries, who have deftly moved around U.S. interests and are creating their own sphere of interest, or, probably more correctly, their system of tribute to China, the emerging giant in the area.

The Middle East wars are ongoing and have been expanded into Pakistan. More troops will probably be sent into Afghanistan while those in Iraq are destined to remain in their forts for some time to come yet. Covert operations and political manipulations have destabilized Pakistan, creating a hostility within its population against the U.S., while U.S. flyboy geeks operate computer consoles within the homeland in order to bomb 'suspected terrorists' half a world away, an easy task for those raised on video war games, collateral damage be damned.

Palestine continues to be 'settled' while ongoing house demolitions and many forms of terror are structured over the area as a whole under the control of the Israeli military. Obama back-tracked very quickly on his verbal support of stopping Israeli settlement building and turned it over to place it as a condition to restart the 'peace' talks, the unending series of Israeli delays and stalls that allow it to continue to occupy the territories and continue construction.

Other problems remain or loom larger for U.S. interests as they continue their unequivocal support of Israel. Lebanon internally has recognized the strength of Hezbollah and accepted its arms as a part of its identity. Iran continues to be harassed and threatened on the pretence of making nuclear weapons, while Israel, Pakistan and India receive a wink and a nod but no official condemnation of their nuclear programs - and North Korea remains a reactionary nuclear stalwart that the U.S. does not seem to know what to do with.

Oil, resources control, and the economy...and...

All this, apart from the religious aspect and the U.S. evangelistic right wing's anticipation of Armageddon combined with Jewish zeal for a pure homeland, is about oil. But not just oil, but all other resources, and not just resources, but the control of those resources and the fear of a rising multi-polarity being led by the Chinese with accompaniment by a renewed belligerence of Russia and the rising economic power of Brazil and India among others (the BRIC nations).

U.S. wealth is built on two things at the moment - the willingness of the world to finance its debts (and thus it wars) and its ability to militarily control the resources or the nations that own the resources and the elites within the nations that up to now at least feared/respected/fawned upon U.S. imperial strength. The rise of the BRIC nations creates huge demands for resources and is creating new liaisons of commerce and trade around the old structures of the U.S., most importantly the declining status of the IMF, World Bank and the WTO. In order for the U.S. to try and maintain the course of the ship of state, it retains its traditional military belligerence, preferring occupation, hostility, covert actions, threats, torture and assassinations to negotiations and productive dialogue - again at odds with the platitudes and rhetoric emanating from Obama's Washington, not much different from Bush's or Clinton's or all the other Washingtons.

Thus, while declining in prestige and limited by asymmetrical power, the U.S. clings to its military horizons in the Middle East, clings to its ephemeral mirages of peace talks between Israel and Palestine, continues to blame the Middle East for problems created by years of colonial exploitation and colonial resource extraction, blind in its vision of itself as the 'light on the hill' that will save all of mankind. It is too blind, too wayward, too uncaring and thoughtless as it pursues its own elitist and narcissistic course.

These resource wars, and the accompanying end run negotiations between various trading partners that now deny the U.S. even observer status in their interactions, accompany the economic decline of the U.S. as economic pundits wait with unknowing anticipation to see if and or when the U.S. loses control of its currency to another reserve currency or system of currencies. Amongst all this, the environment is - literally - laid to waste.

...the environment.

Except for the committed scientists and the informed members of the public, the environment remains of little import to the elite powers. Perhaps it is an attitude that everything will sort itself in the end with the elites remaining at the top of the heap while the poor and downtrodden suffer and wither under whatever global climate change chooses to bring to bear upon us. Or it is simply ignorance, disbelief, a state of suspended animation, while we all cruise along on our consumptive journey, not wishing to contemplate the worst that can happen. Or perhaps the worst that can happen, especially in the short term, is more war, death and destruction as the new plurality of powers manipulate in whatever fashion to regain/maintain their order within the hierarchy of nations.

War of course creates one of the worst environments in which to live, during and after. Civilians suffer the most, and children the most among them. The after effects of Fallujah are now coming to the fore, with stories of increased cancer rates and birth defects, similar to the effects that have been recorded in Vietnam after the use of Agent Orange, and in Japan after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Certainly people affected by this will not worry themselves too much about either the near or distant future.

I expect little if anything from Copenhagen, little if anything from either the U.S. or China or other states wishing to continue to ride along on the current bearing of rising economic wealth. It would prove too costly to our current economic system to do anything realistic to limit climate change (change is already happening, limitations are all that can be expected at best), and would disrupt the comfortable lives of the elites if they had to allow political power to devolve towards the people, creating a true democracy that might and probably would choose a less consumptive egotistical lifestyle ( and therefore less militarily oriented) in order to allay some of the worst effects of climate change.

Globalization and solutions

Another term that is not working out as its supporters intended to. Instead of a MacDonalds in every country preventing war through hamburgers, instead of a flat planet with equal opportunity for all, instead of everyone rising on the tide of continued growth and emerging democracy, all of course based on U.S. standards and ideals, instead of all that, the world is witnessing the decline of U.S. power and the rise of the BRIC powers. The U.S. remains belligerent, it remains within the thrall of Israeli prophecy, it continues to blindly believe its own disproven rhetoric wherein its actions have all too frequently fully contradicted the rhetoric used to make excuses to its own citizens as to why it needs to invade and occupy half the world in order to create democracy and freedom.

There are solutions, to me so obvious that I am not going to reiterate them here at this time. It is not the solutions that are so problematic, but rather the inculcated beliefs of supremacy and righteousness that are so difficult to overcome. And that is where reviewing books and writing critiques and commentaries retains its value.

It is to advocate against the atrocities that the elitist powers hold on to. It is to highlight and recognize that all our current problems - climate change, wars, the economy - are all part and parcel of one large problem - the need for a paradigm shift in the manner in which humanity approaches its lifestyle demands on a finite planet, a paradigm shift in the manner in which a much broader, much longer, much more self effacing view of life is needed in order to plan for a sustainable future that should look quite a bit different than the future that more wars, more occupations, more greed, and unbridled debt-ridden consumptive living would bring to the world.

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"Give him your purse!" I insisted, meaning that hanging on to it wasn't worth our lives. Still, she refused and the tug-of-war in the parking lot of my apartment building continued.

"Here!" I said to the gunman, pitching my wallet to him, "take this!" He caught the wallet, turned and fled across a wide, deserted ballpark. Even in the darkness, we could follow him running for a long way, silhouetted in the lights of the U.S. Capitol, lit up at night ahead of him like a giant white cake.

A few days later I received a call from a Maryland department store inquiring if I had sent a young man to buy a TV set on my credit card. A store detective arrested the youth and I dutifully showed up in court on the day of the trial only to learn he had skipped.

Not long afterwards, a judge who lived in my building made page one of the Washington Star for resisting the gunmen who jumped him in the same parking lot. >From his hospital bed he told reporters we Americans had to "stand up" to armed robbers, a noble sentiment spoken through his pain, considering all the bullets they pumped into his body.

We were lucky, my friend and I. We could have been killed, as so many others are being killed each day. As Jill Lepore writes in the November 9th "The New Yorker," the U.S. "has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom and six times that of Germany." UK averages about 60 gun homicides annually and Germany averages fewer than 200. More Americans are being murdered on our city streets than in all our foreign wars.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert last April 24th estimated 12,000 Americans are shot dead each year, 2,000 of them children, and 70,000 more are wounded but, like the D.C. judge, survive. Do the math: the total number of Americans shot dead each year is three times that of all U.S. troops killed in Iraq in six years of fighting. There is rage in our hearts; there is war in our streets.

A big factor in the homicide rate is the availability of guns. In a typical year, guns are responsible for two of every three murders. There are 238 million privately-owned firearms in USA. Big city mayors and police chiefs favoring curbs on hand guns and automatic weapons seem unable to overcome the clout of the gun lobby in Congress. Americans have modified or ignored much of the U.S. Constitution over the years yet the National Rifle Association insists that the 2nd Amendment phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is sacrosanct, even as innocent people are mowed down by the thousands.

Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, writes, "One of the ugly truths about many gun-control advocates is that they're more concerned about pushing for gun control than they are about reducing violence." Note how LaPierre disparages their motives, when, in fact, some people become gun-control advocates only after the murder or wounding of a family member or friend. It's quite likely that if homicidal waves of handgun violence did not occur nearly every day, as they do, nobody would bother chalking the slogan "Gun Control Now!" on the NRA wall.

"A vastly disproportionate number of murders and murder victims are young adult men," writes The New Yorker's Lepore. "When baby boomers reached that age bracket, the homicide rate soared. Now that they've aged out of their most lethal years, the rate has fallen." Fallen, yet still unacceptable. Marcus Baram of ABC News reported last April 23 that teenagers in Chicago are 10 times more likely to be the victims of gun violence than their counterparts outside the city limits. Between 2002 and 2006, more than 650 Chicago teens were shot and killed! This is nearly as many as all U.S. troop deaths since the start of the war in Afghanistan. Are defenders of "gun rights" blind to the fact we have a war raging in our city streets?

Surely, one factor contributing to the homicide rate is poverty. How many times have you read about youths from affluent suburbs arrested for armed robbery? Can you think of one? Not only are children in blighted cityscapes---where supermarkets and chain retail outlets fear to tread-- deprived of legitimate job opportunities but if they commit crime, do time and are set free, their criminal past makes it tough for them to find gainful work. It's not uncommon for six or seven out of every ten ex-cons to be returned to the Big House within three years of their release, the Justice Department reports. Worse, as "economy measures," legislators right now are closing down prison drug rehab, educational, and vocational programs that would give ex-cons a fighting chance to succeed. There's money for wars in three countries in the Middle East and money to operate a thousand military bases around the world but we short-change our own.

Another contributing factor to the high homicide rate may be the stiff sentences politicians' mandate, enacting laws that limit the sentencing discretion of judges. In his treatise "On Crimes and Punishments," published in 1764, Italian nobleman Cesare Beccaria wrote, "The countries and times most notorious for severity of punishment have always been those in which the bloodiest and most inhumane of deeds were committed."

Famed Chicago lawyer Clarence Darrow argued harsh laws did zero to deter crime. In 18th Century England, he noted, pickpockets worked the crowds at public hangings even though picking pockets was punishable by hanging. Today, stiff sentences have contributed to putting a record 2.3 million Americans behind bars, so many that judges from Alabama to California are ordering governors to make their prisons livable. Legislators are considering paroling oldsters rather than building more lock-ups.

In Congress, bills are being debated (1) to require criminal background checks for all would-be buyers at gun shows, reversing the no-questions-asked practice; (2) to limit bulk sales of handguns; and (3) to ferret out that small minority of reckless licensed gun dealers whose sales account for 60% of crime scene weapons. Such laws can work. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D.-N.J.) claims since enactment of his bill preventing domestic abusers from buying a gun, more than 150,000 attempted gun purchases have been blocked.

In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger recently signed a law obligating sellers of handgun ammunition to record the names of buyers and other information about their purchase. A similar law in Sacramento from mid-January, 2008, through August, 2009, helped police find 229 prohibited people who had illegally bought ammunition---173 of them with previous felony convictions. And by matching ammo purchases with names on the state's prohibited persons file, the Sacramento D.A. could charge 181 illegal ammunition buyers with felonies, according to an article on the Huffington Post.

Californians are reacting to a series of horrific shooting murders. For one, there was the Los Angeles city worker on Feb. 25, 2005, who sprayed his boss and another employee with AK-47 bullets after being reprimanded for showing up late for work. For another, there was the murder at a traffic stop of four Oakland police officers last March 21 by a shooter with a long criminal record. Other states need to follow California's initiative.

Another anti-violence step would be to pay children to stay in school. This could put money into the pockets of young males who might otherwise pull stick-ups, such as the one in Washington referred to above. One organization, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, (NIF-ty for short) advises public school children on how to earn money buying and selling, and many trained kids open their own retail outlets. NFTE founder Steve Mariotti, a former Ford auto executive, got the idea after he was mugged jogging in Manhattan by some youths for the few bucks he was carrying. His outfit reports it has helped 230,000 young people run businesses in 22 states and 13 countries.

Beyond these steps, educators need to press for courses to teach non-violence in our public schools. After all, American children are deluged with violence-filled Hollywood movies and video games where killing is trivialized. The Non-Violence Project USA Inc., whose symbol is a handgun with a knotted barrel, is one non-profit that engages teens in pro-social activities, recognizing the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi's observation, "If we are to achieve real peace, we shall have to begin with children."

Executive Director Diane Landsberg of the Miami chapter in Coral Gables, Fla., says, "We have become a very rude and impatient society. We are taught to rush but not to wait. Courtesy and politeness matters. In order to get respect you've got to give respect." One positive action might be for the NRA's LaPierre to show his critics some respect, to give their ideas a chance, as in Sacramento, to make a difference.

(Reach the author, a former reporter for the Chicago Daily News, at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

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Snapshot History
George Bush invaded Afghanistan to engage in regime change. The justification for the massive assault on Afghanistan was that the Taliban held government would not turn over Osama bin Laden. After running the Taliban out of Kabul, ultimately the oil industry's choice Karzai (former UNOCAL adviser) was installed as the President of Afghanistan. It did not take long for him to be labeled "The Mayor of Kabul."

The Present
After a contested election, Karzai still holds onto power (complete with charges of the corruptness of his government), and he is still the Mayor of Kabul. And despite eight years of U.S. military assault in Afghanistan, the Taliban still control at least 70% of the country. Yes, seventy percent. Further, it is believed that most of al Qaida are now in Pakistan - not Afghanistan, AND the Taliban influence is spreading in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Pakistan, a nuclear armed nation, is facing its own struggles. On one hand there is unrest in the tribal regions, then there is the ongoing undermining of Pakistan's sovereignty via U.S. ground and drone attacks. Pakistan has in many ways shifted from a go-between/ally of the United States to an almost puppet state. However, it is not a happy puppet state. No sovereign nation can allow the continued aggressive military action by a foreign nation within its boundaries without it generating resistance from the populace - be that Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

So the negotiations are on to "deal" with the Pakistan "issue," and the attempts to go after al Qaida, bin Laden, insurgents, the Taliban or whatever enemy is on the rotating menu. An added serious imbalance is the relationship between Pakistan and India. Pakistan becomes a multimodal teeter-totter sitting on a crumbling fulcrum.

Pakistan
The U.S. wants to increase its footprint in Pakistan, and neither the Pakistani government, nor the people, are open to that expansion. However, Pakistan needs money in its coffers and the U.S. is waving "aid" (in the amount of $1.5 billion a year) in front of the government's nose; however, it is aid with tight strings attached. The main stipulation being:

The secretary of State must certify to the US Congress annually that Pakistan's security forces are cutting ties to extremist organizations and that a democratically elected government "exercises effective civilian control of the military." Specifically, the State Department must report on civilian oversight of the military budget process, military involvement in civilian affairs, and even the nitty-gritty of how senior military officers are promoted.

This is a significant given the power of the military in Pakistan, and the long term practice of Pakistan's intelligence organization - the ISI - working with militant groups within both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and being the historic go between for the U.S. and the Taliban. The ISI has been a feared power broker in Pakistan, and one that will play a central role in the success of any agreement between the United States, the Pakistani government, and the Pakistani army.

This situation is only exacerbated by the Pashtun push for independence - even if they must seek the aid of the Taliban. If the Pashtun's align with the Taliban, then any effort to track down al Qaida (if that is truly the target) will be devastating for the civilian population and lead to increased militancy against the U.S. - and Pakistan military presence.

Afghanistan
In my opinion, Afghanistan is a lost cause if the Taliban are not intimately involved in stabilization. For all intents and purposes, it is the Taliban who control Afghanistan - not any "elected" government. I am not saying that the people of Afghanistan want the Taliban in power, but thus far eight years of U.S. and international militarism have not made any progress minimizing Taliban power outside of major population centers. Indeed, the current plan seems to pull U.S. forces back into the larger population centers so that they don't slip into Taliban control. At this point, there is a zero sum game in Afghanistan.

As with U.S. intervention using Afghanistan in a proxy war against the Soviet Union, U.S. (and western nations') interest in Afghanistan are not equal to the Afghans determination for their independence. If we had spent the billions we have spent on blowing up Afghanistan on real aid to improve the lives of the people, everyone would be in a much better situation. I strongly suspect, that the power of the Taliban would have eroded, and a much more peaceful region would have been the outcome. No one is hungrier for peace than the people of Afghanistan.

Hidden Casualties
The Afghan refugee situation is largely hidden from the U.S. audience. After the early reporting on refugee camps at the beginning of the invasion, there has been a virtual blackout on refugees in the U.S. media. Refugees International states:

Today more than three million registered refugees remain in exile - 2.1 million in Pakistan and 0.9 million in Iran - and hundreds of thousands more are living abroad to escape economic hardship or targeted violence. Many are now being pressured to return home despite the fact that living conditions are not always secure or humane.

The estimated population of Afghanistan is 28.396 million. An estimated three million are displaced within the region, and certainly a large number are displaced inside Afghanistan, and those who previously fled to Europe are no longer welcome.

Refugees have fled to Italy, France, and the UK. They have survived in places like the Calais "jungle" in France. However, France doesn't want the migrants anymore, and is shutting down Calais. Most of the 1500 people remaining in the crumbling Calais camp are refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq. They have sought asylum, but Europe is getting much stingier in granting it. Despite the economic and personal costs paid by these migrants, Calais will be razed. The asylum seekers will be sent back or sent on.

Other refugees are increasingly seeking haven in Tajikistan, where they struggle to learn Russian and Cyrillic while living in horrible conditions. However, despite the poverty of Tajikistan relative to its neighbors, at least they will accept refugees. So more come hoping to rebuild lives that have been destroyed behind them.

I imagine that should conditions stabilize and improve in Afghanistan, many of the refugees would go home to rebuild their lives. As the displaced within Afghanistan hope for the opportunity to do the same.

Do Afghans Want the Taliban in Power?
From what news reports (largely from the BBC and a few independent journalists) I have seen, people don't relish the idea of the Taliban ruling again. However, the Taliban militias have a great recruiting tool - they can pay. So now the Taliban forces have roughly achieved military strength. One could argue that the Taliban are virtually the only "game" in Afghanistan, which speaks to the woeful failure of the "strategy" of the U.S. (under Bush and Obama) and NATO.

It seems likely that if the Pashtuns in Pakistan are pushing for their own state, that the Pashtuns in Afghanistan will hope for the same. Rather than creating unity, the effects of failed intervention in the interests of Western nations may result in a fracturing of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ways Forward
Given the complication and sheer destruction which has left competing powers as virtually independent operators, and people's lives in devastation, it is hard to see what will help - particularly over the short term. It seems that Obama is willing to continue a primarily military (or militaristic) path in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama has expanded the Bush administration's practices of covert troop increases in the region using "rotations" and outsourcing to corporate mercenaries to expand military presence. We seem to be in the same situation in Afghanistan as we were in Iraq: "As Afghan military and police stand up, we will stand down." However, our presence in Iraq is not substantively decreasing (especially when one counts "contractors"), and both formal troops and "contractors" are increasing in Afghanistan. Obama has also expanded the use of drones. One could even argue that the $1.5 billion in aid to Pakistan is in effect hiring the Pakistani army as contract forces for U.S. interests. What does "aid" mean in this context?

But the people want peace, to be able to support their families, to have hope for their futures. A "grassroots" experienced U.S. President might apply some of that insight to the turbulence in the region. Assistance in developing internal and external markets in Afghanistan and Pakistan would go a long way towards giving the people options they currently do not have. Assisting community and tribal leaders in building infrastructure and security would go towards balancing the power of the Taliban and whatever al Qaida organization exists in the region.

The poppies of Afghanistan seem to be an endless source of fund raising and international heroin markets. It would seem to be a no-brainer to use those poppies in legitimate ways - namely for the medical market. Why does Tasmania Australia have 40% of the medical opium market? India allows production of medical opium poppies, and they might resist legalization in Afghanistan. Regardless, why can't Afghanistan be a legal supplier of opium for medical uses?

Afghanistan does have natural resources - particularly oil, natural gas and coal - which is part of the reason for ongoing U.S. "interest" in the area. (See also Assessment of Undiscovered Petroleum Resources of Northern Afghanistan, 2006) However, the real energy interests in Afghanistan have been the pipeline to ensure the West's oil supply. It seems that "safeguard" should be profitable for the people of Afghanistan.

Realistically, many of the people of Afghanistan may not want to join the "modern world" on the "modern world's" terms. They have local economies and ways of life that have sustained and enriched them for thousands of years. Stability would go a long way towards allowing local economies to function effectively once again.

What seems very clear is that there is not a military solution to the instability of the region. However, a military presence in that region serves a variety of purposes for the United States and the "West." Whose interest will prevail? Those of the people, or those of the the competing powers?

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On September 2, 2009, Reuters reported that ElBaradei believes the nuclear threat is "hyped." According to the article:

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said there was no concrete evidence that Tehran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program.

"But somehow, many people are talking about how Iran's nuclear program is the greatest threat to the world. In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped," he told the specialist Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

This does not mean that ElBaradei is giving Iran a bye on the issue. He has consistently called for greater transparency from Iran. However, he does not see the imminent threat claims that keep reemerging from Israel, and under Bush, and now under Obama.

Perhaps part of his hesitancy regarding the imminent threat posed by Iran has to do with the documentation the IAEA has been looking at regarding Iran's nuclear status and ambitions. This comes in the form of sheaves of documentation coming from the United States and other "western" nations. The concerns over this documentation were discussed by Gareth Porter writing for the Inter Press Service on September 14, 2009.

According to Porter, and verified by his sources, is that there is possible veracity to Iran's claim that these documents are forgeries. While the IAEA tacitly vouches for the credibility of the documents as they "appear(s) to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, is detailed in content and appears to be generally consistent". However:

Iran has submitted serious evidence that the documents are fraudulent. Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations in Vienna, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IPS in an interview he had pointed out to a team of IAEA officials in a meeting on the documents in Tehran in spring 2008 that none of the supposedly top secret military documents had any security markings of any kind, and that purported letters from defence ministry officials lacked Iranian government seals.

Soltanieh recalled that he had made the same point "many times" in meetings of the Board of Governors since then. "No one ever challenged me," said the ambassador.

The IAEA has responded to this issue by suggesting that perhaps the supplying agencies have removed these types of identifying markers. As noted by Porter, why would an agency remove marking from documents that proved the validity of their origins and nature? Porter gives one specific example of the type of document which Iran claims is fraudulent:

Iran has also provided the IAEA with evidence that the handwritten notes on a May 2003 letter, which supposedly link a private Iranian contractor to the "alleged studies", were forged by an outside agency. The letter was from an engineering firm to the private company Kimia Maadan, which other documents in the collection identify as responsible for part of the alleged covert nuclear weapons programme called the "green salt project".

The letter itself has nothing to do with any "green salt" project, but handwritten notes on the copy of the letter given to the IAEA by an unidentified government referred to individuals who are named in other intelligence documents as participants in the "alleged studies", according to the latest IAEA report.

But the original letter, which Iran has provided to the IAEA, has no handwritten notes on it. Amb. Soltanieh recalled that he showed that original letter to an IAEA team led by the deputy director of IAEA's Safeguards Department, Herman Nackaerts, in Tehran Jan. 22-23, 2008.

He said the IAEA team was able to compare the original document with the copy that they had been given as part of the alleged studies documents and that Nakaerts declared that his team accepted the authenticity of the original they were shown.

I am starting to hear a lot of "You can't believe Iran because they have consistently lied to us." This sounds suspiciously like the methodology used to justify discounting Iraq's claim they did not have "Weapons of Mass Destruction." We were told the "Hussein's a liar, has always lied, he's lying now." Well we know how that turned out.

I don't know what the status is of Iran's nuclear projects - nor their purpose. However, once burned twice cautious as they say. It makes me quite nervous that the corporate media seems to not be any more cautious in jumping on the "Bad Iran" band wagon than they were on the "Bad Iraq" band wagon. Either they are stupid and don't learn from their mistakes, or they have much to gain from unquestionably beating the drums.

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Here is the situation.

A leading religious politician, who is also a sitting partner with the government in power, has called the recent killing of Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsood as martyrdom (hint: the politician's name starts with Fazal, ends at Rehman and can hardly breath because of thick folds of fat around his overfed frame). Then some say that the Afghan Taliban, at least, are fighting a war of liberation against the occupiers and are therefore heroes rather than villains. And then there are some strategists and media men who further fog up the lens by saying that there are bad Taliban but there are also some 'good Taliban' out there. And that these 'good Taliban' can be talked with.

Not withstanding the fact that the aforesaid is a lot of balderdash, the end result is that whereas pigeonholing the Taliban in a particular group would have been a rather simple task, it continues to elude the branding. The situation remains pretty confusing for a lay reader.

After being sired by the United States, mothered by Pakistan, midwifed by a clutch of Middle Eastern entities and wet-nursed by a whole bunch of vested interests, the Taliban had fought another war of liberation in the past. That one was against the then USSR. The senseless savagery of their devastating rule in Afghanistan in the aftermath of that war of liberation still echoes in the region.

The fig leaf on the so called 'war of liberation' that these gents are fighting over in Afghanistan will be lifted soon after the departure of the Coalition forces. The melee that will ensue for capturing Kabul will be as bloody as the inside of a Kandahari pomegranate. This time around, after they have defeated the clay footed Johny Bravos of the Coalition forces, the only improvements that one can expect is that perhaps the limbs will be chopped a little closer to the hands and feet and the women will still be flogged but by an officially issued stick of defined measurements, not just any stick.

And of their being Martyrs for any cause, or there being something called 'good Taliban' among them as some jokers suggest, the less said, the better. Were it not for ordinary human decency, one would have wished these clowns to have the Taliban's long blunt knives hover just above their jugulars. And after a drone took out the knife wielder, one would have then asked them whether that was a good Talib or a bad one or a martyr. After such incidences, such jesters are known to have developed an extra spring in their gaits while fleeing from places wherefrom the word Taliban is spoken.

So what is the truth?

The truth, perhaps, is far simpler. And that is that they are in fact nothing more than religiously inspired killers, ones who kill for the cause, fearless in business of death and ready to sacrifice themselves for that elusive, yet oft promised eternal glory. Religion is the golden shoe with which they have been beating everyone senseless thus far.

The Taliban are a group of people that reveres gods of death, murder and vengeance. Some do not trouble themselves with worshiping any thing beyond their own ability to cause mayhem and butchery. Their strength comes from surprise and from their complete disregard for the rules of honorable combat. They, by their nature, betray those whose trust they have gained, kill women and children on whims, and strike terror into the hearts of an average decent human being.

Raised from childhood in the arcane schools of murder, where they learn to use their stealthy knives to mortifying effect, they serve the will of their lords in whose pay they remain until death. In their pursuit of an indefinable Caliphate, they long to usurp governments and sovereigns. They cling to their strongholds in far corners, dispensing rough and ready justice in remote villages and distant valleys. Their targets are the government's local agents, the armies sent out to wage wars against them, clergy that does not toe their line and supporters of all the aforementioned entities. For them killing is not just a business tool but also a construct with which to spread terror, perpetuate chaos and preach their dark gospel.

What must be borne in mind however is that while murder is a part of their existence and legend, it is not the reason of their being. They are the fanatical followers of a cult that believes that theirs is the only straight path to enlightenment and all other thoughts, faiths and sects are wrong and wicked. They fervently believe that their god will prevail over all others and those who do not welcome the 'true' faith will be punished, either by them now or by their deity in the hereafter. But as that time is yet to come, the Taliban will remain ready in the meanwhile to kill and die at the command of their Emir.

The Taliban combine deadly skills with an absolute belief in the holy nature of the carnage they inflict. As devout followers of a central Emir, they know their cause is correct and their actions are approved by their Emir. For this reason, recruitment is mostly done from illiterate, poverty ridden classes assuring them the ultimate pleasures of a promised heaven. Opportunities are also open to common rogues and thugs who wish to wash off their lifelong misdeeds with glorious martyrdom. Just like the assassins of the past, the recruits are encouraged to use hashish freely so they can occasionally enter paroxysms of joy by hallucinating glimpses of afterlife in paradise. The more hardened ones are urged to take opium to help them achieve warm feelings of contentment and wellbeing.

The real adventure for the Taliban is not the defense of their ideology, whatever that may be. On the contrary, they instantly transport into a heightened state of excitement when a real threat comes against those they serve. While they rarely pursue adventure for the sake of adventure, some Taliban are exceptions to the rule. They use the constant danger of adventuring life as a way to hone their killer instincts and associated skills.

The Taliban are masters of the art of terror. In this pursuit, their tools remain surprise and stealth, barbarity and cruelty, cunning and underhanded tactics. Along with other weapons, they carry these tools wrapped in a blood soaked pennant of faith. As a group, therefore, their absolute faithlessness and amorality makes them as dangerous as a pack of mad dogs. So fearsome is this combination of skills and tactics that they are now one of the most dreaded groups of criminals ever.

From foot soldiers to the higher ranks within the Taliban organization, the career path weaves through a pattern of a kind unimaginable by ordinary human beings. The higher the attributes of wiliness, hatred, abject brutality and ever-readiness for massacre, the greater are the chances of promotion. Specially gifted ones relish the particular cruelty of adding treachery and shock to routine slaughter they are sent out to commit. The more paranoid a killer, the higher he stands chances of rising in the Taliban's rank hierarchy. Those who succeed in all these traits are ultimately chosen as the leaders. This can clear up why it took so much of time to find a successor to Baitullah. The potential candidate had to prove his credentials beyond doubt.

The pitiable foot soldiers of this organized guild, having been brainwashed into this madness through constant religious sermons since childhood, soon turn into zealots who kill at the pleasure of their leaders. Consequently, bound by divine spells, they turn into freaks who see no significance or method in their madness beyond the inherent pleasure of killing. The earlier this happens, the quicker they get into the race for leadership of their cadres.

The chief aim during training is to instill in the trainee the idea that though murdering in any way is useful and dreaded by the victim, it must also be done in a way that terrorizes the general populace. Through constant sermons, the recruit is convinced that the Talib is an executioner who kills out of a holy principle, that he kills not out of lust but for divine ideals. By the time the lines blur in his mind, his Emir has a slayer that is both professional and fanatic and is willing to kill for the cause of his Emir at a moment's notice.

From the aforesaid, a few conclusions can safely be drawn;

1. There are no good or bad Taliban. There are just Taliban and they understand only the language of force.

2. There is no de-programming the zombies now. The only solution to the problem lies in rolling a military steam roller from end to end over the entire FATA and then taking immediate steps to drain the swamps of poverty and neglect that have accumulated over there for some decades now.

Perhaps no one has ever explained better than Voltaire the dangers inherent in extremist ideologies of any kind. He once said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities".

We all need to check our premises.

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The 9/11 event should have never taken place. Regardless of the situation, targeting civilians is unconditionally reviled. No matter where we stand on war, and how do we wish to rationalize and define extremism, and even terror, we must pause to remember those who died on that day, and the many, many more who died in the months and years that followed.

Sadly, we must even pause today for those who will die tomorrow, to avenge the victims of the twin towers. 9/11 was a tragedy that should have been studied within the parameters of US foreign policies vis-à-vis Muslim countries, in the Middle East region in particular. If we wish not to venture that far, then an honest look at the period that followed the first Gulf War of 1990-91, and the tragic sanctions that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, is certainly warranted.

Anger, when becomes protracted and multifaceted, is at risk of inspiring extremism and rationalizing terror. But there are other facets to be examined when political violence is to be scrutinized. 9/11 cannot be divorced from surrounding events, preceding tragedies or subsequent ones. By not doing so, one undermines the seriousness of the tragedy.

And while one simply cannot pardon blind hate or terror, how can one honestly argue that the millions who perished in Iraq, prior or following 9/11 ought not to be remembered on that day as well.

Does their fate have any correlation to the tragedy? And what about the many thousands who died in Afghanistan, including the latest 90 people who were burned alive when the NATO forces bombed two fuel tankers in the northern part of the country a few days ago? Do they not deserve commemoration as well? Are not their destinies somehow intimately intertwined? This cannot be denied.

Yet, such a view is overshadowed by another, which in some way reflects man's most basic primal instincts and the lust for sheer revenge. Examining the Bush legacy -- which, if anything, gave life and credence to the idea that violence is a justified political means to achieve set goals and even economic interests -- one comes face to face with the ultimate antitheses of such a notion.

But with the help and expertise of media czars, especially the likes of Fox News, such primeval ways of thinking were embraced with ease. "Shock and Awe" was much more sophisticated than 9/11; it was accompanied by a voice over, and eloquent commentators who kindly explained exactly what we saw on the screen, but the idea was still the same. Innocents died so horribly that political scores would be settled and gains could be exacted. But Barack Obama is not George W. Bush, we are told. The new president has promised to fix what his predecessor had destroyed, and Muslims -- and in fact the world -- are still waiting to see.

When the US president spoke in Cairo, on June 4, he said: "So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations -- to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope 
of all humanity."

Obama spoke and Muslims listened. They clapped and cheered when he greeted the Cairo crowd with "Assalamu alaikum". As sadly as it were, they were desperate for validation, for hope, that perhaps in the recognition of these common aspirations of which he spoke of, that perhaps there would be some softening of the US iron fist that is slowly strangling Muslims in so many parts of our stricken world.

And although Obama went to great lengths to express a common humanity, his forces continue to ravage Muslims without pause: news from Afghanistan is ever grim. Iraq's calamities are also compared. His statements on Palestine are lukewarm and faithfully precluded with a solemn pledge of America's undying allegiance to the Jewish State.

Keeping these things in mind, it is at times difficult to have full trust in the sincerity of the president's proclamations. Muslims, like the rest of humanity, remember 9/11 with a somber pause. They remember the day's victims, all of them and they wonder if the death count will cease any time soon.

The tragedy of 9/11 and the previous and subsequent tragedies are too serious, too terrible to give up hope so quickly that common sense will prevail, that horrible scenes would be replaced by positive ones, that dialogue would replace hostility, and that Obama will meet even if the minimum expectations of his fans in the Muslim world.

9/11 should not be a political episode to underscore the reason of why the fight in various Muslim countries should continue; nor should it be an opportunity to rejoice at the death of 
the "infidels".

We should collectively abhor the rationalization of violence on the basis of vengeance, and consider what it might take to relieve those afflicted with a sense of hostility: Could it perhaps be that our common aspirations for peace and freedom are somehow out of reach? Could it be possible that we just might be culpable for the denial of those simple aspirations of peace and freedom?

We must embrace again the anguish of what happened on 9/11, ever aware that the body count grows even today. And although the wreckage of that horrible day was cleared away years ago, the lessons of that day are still buried beneath our anger, frustration, and prejudice.

To unearth these lessons, we must widen our horizons, from New York to Baghdad, from Kabul to Gaza, cities, which are in some way worlds apart, but in other ways much closer than we may innocently suspect.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

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Despite lingering concerns and opposition from southern method-actors, Blunderdick half-heartedly mentioned to Widdledub that minor republican hummingbirds like Yooo, addicted to the red sticky of downwardly spiraling empirical realities always get access to the hegemonic legal juice and can still utter flutteringly laudable lies whether re-employed as counsel or wingnutted for political profit into creamy base-butter.

Widdledub slowly climbed the 22 key steps to his new ambiguous law office as deficits of doom squelched his languorous feelings like positron props holding up the democratic future. Grabbing Siddamn's unloaded 9.11 mil. Grok Huss-Pistol from his office trophy drawer and making a gurgling sound, Widdle wobbled for a spider-hole moment. A frantic call had just come in from Blunderdick's snide-kick, Diz Blamey (not the Lizbian one).  She screeched that somewhere over the rainbow in New York City in the duo-pluvial northeastern summer; Widdledub's 9.11 bullyhorn had been designated as misplaced malice aforethought!

Media memories had never spoken so intensely to Blamey's amorphous eyes without recalling the high notes that Daddydick had reached in the good old once-upon-a-time days before big-eyed blog surveillance had broadcast Blunder's blunders.  But now, even in the absurd suburbs and urburbs across ill-ogical Amerika, ice cream wagons driven by out-of-work lefties preprogrammed to restore organic cows wheeled through her thoughts, pressing her senses toward taste-buds of tubbiness and concealed curios and digitized alibi-sexual melodies repeating without mercy, evoking dreamy days that never were, but evolving solely for this simul-contrast demo-counter to Sunday talk shows.

Under Blunderdick's outstanding anti-Constitutional orders, Dizzie's bubbles of facial anxiety nearly burst when the uptight Lamebridge police department skipped through Widdle's (so far) closed Gates and surrounded the mystery woman, Gallery Flame, who had shown up unexpectedly like an outed CIA agent in an open dart gallery, concealing Widdledub and Blunderdick's unredeemed trophy tickets for the Guantanamo Bay Closing Ceremonies. Without standing conviction, Ms. Gallery noted as an aside to Diz that a post-post-press conference strategy had yet to be instigated by the gate-keeping community concerning the content of the 9.11 Lamebridge police tapes, and who called whom a what, by any other name.

Widdle reconfiddled his pistol while twittering for dollars in reckless rhythms. (Undisclosed in olfactory fictions with pre-existing renditions, Blunderdick had once again "accidentally" stolen Widdledub's bullyhorn without asking and was thundering his own anomalous repartee into the late Liddynight air).

Dubbuns holstered his gun and tweeted his grand opening statement to the press. By now the total media circus was in town setting up for the surreptitious spectacle of Widdledub dressed distinctly in a black judge's costume with an oversized white cowboy hat floating overhead; a rhinestone Happy Trails belt wrapped snugly around his embroidered demeanor. He smiled for the cameras like a lunitary ex-ecutive and continued writing scary decisions with disappearing ink, mimicking those enacted while in office. But instead of receiving the giddy glare of anticipated pre-publicity, all spotlights suddenly whirled toward the lonely figure of the new Whitehouse Precedent.

O-BALM-AH Reveals "Social" is a Pre-Existing Condition of Humanity

Mercifully slowing down the merry-go-round of transparent Health "care" lobbyistical bummers, Precedent O-Balm-Ah simultaneously achieved vibrational epiphanies in the heads of nihilistic reporters and the beds of corrupt members of Congress concerning their imminent vacations. But chiefly aiming his wizened words to the synthetically-profitable middle masses and to the many dis/under/insured debt-laden and disabled-by-disasters "our country isn't us anymore" citizens, he announced a pronouncement affirming the pre-existing socialized nature of illness (which is no longer covered by privatized health insurance.)

Suppressing his familial health insurance history like a cancer victim on pain-killers, O-Balm-Ah calmly un-elevened the abstract health of the nation, while also disarming Widdledub of his nine-o'clock Grok with a donation of bifurcated cowboy boots and a fresh copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate.

Notwithstanding a few New Guernsey organ re-locators, the citizen's representatives had pro-formally dressed up for the public's last option, but there was not a single payer at the revolving door, other than Denny Kucinich, Anthony Weiner and 76% of the American public.

Precedent O-Balm-Ah then declared that the Constitution was still in effect, in effect, though sorely affected by perverse capitalization, consensual stupidity, and herewith unreformed profiteering of the Common Good.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/us/06gun.html

http://pacelawlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/04/doj-releases-bush-administration-memos.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_Presidential_Center

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761572066_1____2/Positron.html#s2

http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/reference/archive/tags/George+W.+Bush/default.aspx

http://www.loc.gov/law/help/statements.php

http://law-library.rutgers.edu/archives/000201.php

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/sites/afterdowningstreet.org/files/askinsuit.pdf

http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2009/07/sounds-very-scholarly.html

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/16/bush-bio-iraq/

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/george_w_bush_presidential_library/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/nyregion/24jersey.html?em

http://www.democrats.com/single-payer-committee-whip

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/17/obama-boost-new-poll-show_n_217175.html Collapse

From a purely power-politics point of view, of course, they are right: judging by the ugly noises echoing across the oceans from America, Scotland has done itself no favor.

But if all affairs are to be carried on in every country from that point of view, it seems to me that it is acceptance of America's right to dictate every matter over the planet, including such intimate matters as how individual countries interpret justice and the government of laws.

This is the acceptance of a de facto aristocracy running the world since American voters - and only about half of eligible Americans bother to vote - represent only a percent or so of the planet's population. It is remarkable how many Americans do not understand the basic point that not everything a democracy does is democratic or decent or even acceptable, especially things done outside its borders.

Democracies abuse power just as surely as any other form of government, and a democracy with the immense military power of the United States - a power virtually cancerous to genuine democratic values - provides a case study in the inexorable workings of Lord Acton's dictum.

It would also represent a repression of all the better motives from which individuals and societies act now and then, surprising us and raising the standard of human behavior from the violent-chimpanzee standard that tends to hold for much of humanity and is especially notable in America's international affairs.

That is unacceptable to most people who are not Americans or who are not dedicated flatterers of America seeking leftovers being dropped from its groaning table.

You only have to ask yourself how Americans themselves would react to others telling them how they should run their court system. The sound would be deafening, like the bellowing of walrus bulls on a stony beach in mating season, which is actually pretty close to the sound of some of America's professional-victim families today.

Mercy is never misplaced, and I think Scottish justice has reached an admirable decision despite the bellowing of the unthinking American families we have heard from for years.

Apart from that, and a very important consideration, it is almost certain that al-Megrahi is innocent, having been fitted up by American intelligence desperate for a scapegoat with the relentless political pressure of the walrus-bull families.

I have to say, also, I always find it troubling to read the press repeating the lines about 270 victims for the thousandth time. It is an American mantra, emphasizing the special and precious nature of American lives over all others, at least, that is, the lives of upper middle-class Americans.

Rarely do we read an accurate perspective on the Lockerbie event.

The United States Navy stupidly shot down an Iranian airliner with 300 souls aboard as it observed the devastation of the Iran-Iraq War, a devastation America had an important hand in extending.

Those 300 innocent men, women, and children received no mercy, and their horrible deaths certainly never saw any justice. Their families never received compensation. And no apology was even offered by Americans, a disgusting set of behaviors, entirely.

Lockerbie was absolutely clearly revenge, but no one knows who actually committed the act of revenge.

I might offer the observation, too, that it is the same bellowing Americans always ready to use capital punishment or torture and assassinate opponents or, indeed, to invade the lands of those with whom they disagree, bombing and killing countless innocents - three million just in Vietnam, another million or so in the Cambodia they de-stabilized, and another million or so in Iraq.

The whole pattern of the two acts of wanton destruction explains the basis for the so-called War on Terror. It is simply America's saying, "I can do to you, but you can't do to me."

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Kakourgos, Onourtourbus, Yurwithus, Yuraginus, he poured forthwith into the faux microphoney.

Notorious for his derivative sneers tilted to common people but also skewed to the vanishing middle class, Widdledub refused to reference by name (but body-languaged) his favorite megalomedia "accidental" shooter, Blunderdick. Suddenly stumbling deeper into his own financial foibles, he blurted," the verdict is out on socialism." He now seemed hazy about his green paper TARP, which flew by intentional coincidence over America's depleted soils.

"I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work," doubled-negged Widdle. Deep into one side of the face, he decided to stop talking while his numbers continued to fall. He left the odditorium stage as his last applause line linked his self-described "soul" to a lack of citizen popularity and French fries.

Widdledub wished to distance himself from Blunder's recent networked torture confession which had been televised internationally. But regarding his obdurate torture policies he yielded, "The first thing you do is ask what's legal?" and "Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

One-minded and all, the detainees Widdledub cited had finished their lengthy rehab at the Saudi Sentre for Singing in Unison in 2007. Since enduring Widdle's policy of foreign care and counseling tactics, some of the jihadis had begun anew, their bodies and minds still driven by suffering the Blunderdick's untouchable unterrorgators.

Stepping over Raygun's glove, Widdledub retired to the skene, breaking the rehearsed circularity of the neocon design but making infantile noises under the flying fish arches where the golden public stood in union lines still hoping for Oh-Balm-Ah's uneleven bread. The new Prez had already flown over for the rescue, but hovered up in the air, nearly becoming a constellation.

Waiting made the people hungrier and feverish, but Iran had run away with a burning news cycle while more US soldiers were invisibly dying next door, and besides, the smoke and mirrors were obscuring their telling visions.

Declassify my mind? Declassify my brine? Declassify my byline? Widdledub chimed, repositioning his cowboy hat for a new song and a dance. He left the fund raising arena after dropping off some co-optation, patronage, and coercion, humming an old Saw-di da'wah, supercilious la-dee-do-dah-day, either zoned-out or jumping the snarks.

:::::::::

Un-Finis Parrhasia: (free speech)

in spite of Kakourgos (evil doers)

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/05/obama-adminis-1.html

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/06/bush-assails-those-who-offer-terrorists-therapy-though-his-administration-sent-detainees-to-saudi-co.html

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/18/bush-takes-swipes-at-policies-of-obama/?page=2

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/cp97_boucek_saudi_final.pdf

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/ifstoneinterview.html

http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/dunkle/studyguide/clouds.htm

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/18/bush-takes-swipes-at-policies-of-obama/

http://antiwar.com/casualties/list.php

Author's Note: The characters of Widdledub and Blunderdick were created this spring in Talking Points Memo Cafe by the writers "Flowerchild" and tpmgary, respectively. Thank you!

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The signs seem to indicate that the current economic downturn will continue, and perhaps even intensify over the next couple of years. Part of this has to do with more real estate issues, part with continued job losses, and part with the global economic scenario. For real people, things do not look all that good.

The real estate debacle is not behind us. The chart below from Credit Suisse shows mortgage reset activity remaining high through 2011. Elizabeth Warren, appearing on the August 12, 2009 MSNBC "Morning Joe," warned that another shoe would be dropping as commercial real estate entered a reset period that runs through 2012.

The chart below is an edited version found in an article by Doug Hornig, which is originally from page 47 of the Credit Suisse 2007 report Mortgage Liquidity du Jour: Underestimated No More

The U.S. (and other nations) continue to experience rising unemployment. The upbeat report by the Obama administration stating that the unemployment rate had dropped while the number of new claims increased was based largely on dropping 637,000 people from the labour count. In other words, a statistical change occurred in the number of people actively looking for work. It does not mean they became employed.

All those job losses translated into a 34 % increase in consumer bankruptcies - in July alone. Unemployment (and under-employment) is also fueling ongoing foreclosures. Foreclosures and tight credit drives down housing (and real estate values) putting more people (and businesses) upside down on their loans.

Not surprisingly, the global nature of the economic collapse is reflected in a major hit on global trade. It is down 36% from its peak in July 2008 or about $1.5 trillion.

And so we cycle around and around, sinking a bit lower on each spin. All of the indicators I see do not signal a recovery. However, there are other indicators which could be interpreted with a new meaning: that "recovery" may not mean the same thing any more. If "recovery" means returning to where we were before the current crisis, then the odds seem slim indeed. If "recovery" means returning to the growth path we were on, then the odds seem long beyond calculation. The reasons for this have to do with the physical constraints of the planet. Simply, there would appear to be a limit on the resources and capacity of the planet for continued development, growth, and exploitation.

Below are a series of graphs. The first one is a sample of an exponential growth curve. These curves are characterised by their "J" type formation. The sharpness of the "J" depends upon the rate of growth that the curve is measuring.

Sample of an Exponential Growth Curve

(From: Regents Prep Algebra Lesson

Here is the fossil fuels curve. This represents the dominant form of energy use around the world (and particularly in "developed" nations) at this point in time. Since it is frequently argued that the other human growth curves (population, development, per capita income, etc) are linked to energy availability, then the energy curve is distinctly important in any recovery.

(From: Geothermal Education Office slide 117)

However, fossil fuels are not the only resources that we use. This graph from The New Scientist is instructive (link gives scalable image of graph below).

Of interest is that if global consumption continues at the current rate, the materials indicated have a life expectancy of 58 years (on average). However, if the global rate increase to half of the U.S. current consumption, the expectancy drops to 20 years. Currently the uranium supply is expected to last another 30-40 years, but every nation that has the capability (including the U.S.) wants to dramatically increase the number of nuclear power plants to make up for the loss of fossil fuels (and decrease CO2 emissions). Such an increase would likely halve that 30-40 year estimate.

Certainly one major consideration is the global growth in population. That alone would naturally increase consumption of resources. However, if you add increasing consumption AND population growth, then the impacts increase significantly.

(From: SUSPS)

And of course we have the issue that consistently gets talked about, but not acted on - global warming. Below is a graph of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. While CO2 is hardly the only contributor to global warming, it is an indicator we ignore at our own peril.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

(From: Planet for Life)

Back to "J" curves.

I would make the proposition that an exponential growth pattern is not sustainable in a closed environment. When we look at fossil fuels, resources, population, CO2 (among a myriad of things we could measure), all are on an exponential curve. This means that any "recovery" will occur in a physical environment of increased demand and (soon) decreased availability. In other words, we cannot return to the previous path and continue on our merry way.

Some of you may be science fiction fans, and have read (or watched) the stories of people mining the junk yards for resources. We could well find ourselves in that situation. In fact, in poorer areas of the world, they are already "mining" our "junk." For example, in China (and elsewhere) electronics - particularly computers - are smelted down for precious metals or stripped for reusable parts. This may become a global (pre)occupation. Reducing consumption - or radically changing what and how we consume - is central to any recovery. So to is firmly addressing the issue of population. The U.S. consistently withdraws global family planning funds because of "religious" considerations. We have to get past this, and put reproductive control in the hands of women. That birth planning and control needs to be in women's hands. Such power increases the voice and status of half the population. It also reduces the number of unintended (or forced) pregnancies.

We need to look real hard at Reduce - Reuse - Recycle, and follow it. There are huge implications of the "three Rs."

Reduce, means consume less. Not good news in a society where consumption is 70% of the economy. However, reducing consumption would be aided by improving the quality and longevity of what is produced (get rid of planned obsolescence). On the other hand, there are those things which really do have a short use expectancy - packaging for example. These things should have an accelerated degradation so they do not persist in the environment, or can be remanufactured to other purposes.

Reduce also has possibilities for the energy scenario. It is estimated that we could globally reduce energy use by 60% by increasing energy efficiency across the board (transportation, electronics, buildings). Such efficiencies can lengthen the time frame to depletion, though not eliminate it.

Reuse means the repurposing of things. The simplest example is using plastic food containers for other storage purposes. However, it would be helpful if they could be used for the same food storage. In other words, instead of everything coming neatly packaged, people could refill their containers from bulk sources. Some stores already have this option for some consumables. Reuse may also be taking items and passing them on, or recycling them for a different purpose (clothing fabric into rugs for example).

Recycling presupposes a use for the recycled material. Right now, there is some recycling that occurs (unevenly across the country and across the world). However, the uses of recycled materials is not what it could be. Right now, the primary use for recycled plastic is outdoor furniture. We only need so many picnic tables in the world. Right now there is a global argument on the use of plastic bags. However, plastic bags are not the only plastic issue. Plastic seems to be the packaging of choice - even for food. It shouldn't be, and it doesn't need to be. It is something that the world can no longer afford to use the way that it does.

We need to look at the future (and the present) very differently. In that examination, we need to reframe the "economy." This may be the hardest for the U.S. to do. We have structured an economic system (and to some extent enforced it globally) where money stands between the individual and virtually everything needed to live (housing, food, power, education, water, medical care ...). This means that folks must get money legally, illegally, or through inheritance, to survive. When that legal path is based on high consumption, then we are chasing our tails through a tunnel of mirages. Profit means getting excess value - from the planet, from the workers, and from consumers. We are at the end of excess, therefore we need to reimagine a different way of living.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with needing to either change our path - or be forced to change our path. The planet provides certain baseline realities that add dimension to the current economic crisis - and strategies to "get out of it." Simply regaining the status quo is not a solution (or at least not one that will last long). In fact, a return to our previous path will only accelerate the next collapse - for which we will have even less capacity to respond. It is critical that we not be lulled to sleep by soothing rhetoric, and demand real answers - and real leadership - from decision makers.

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Instead, let's make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare.

It would be so easy. You don't have to reinvent the wheel with this so-called "public option" that's a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won't - just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy you're so comfortable with.

Just pass a simple bill - it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people - that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.

So it's revenue neutral!

To make it available to people of low income, raise the rates slightly for all currently non-eligible people (like me - under 65) to cover the cost of below-200%-of-poverty people. Revenue neutral again.

Most of us will do damn near anything to get out from under the thumbs of the multi-millionaire CEOs who are running our current insurance programs. Sign me up!

This lets you blow up all the rumors about death panels and grandma and everything else: everybody knows what Medicare is. Those who scorn it can go with Blue Cross. Those who like it can buy into it. Simplicity itself.

Of course, we'd like a few fixes, like letting Medicare negotiate drug prices and filling some of the holes Republicans and AARP and the big insurance lobbyists have drilled into Medicare so people have to buy "supplemental" insurance, but that can wait for the second round. Let's get this done first.

Simple stuff. Medicare for anybody who wants it. Private health insurance for those who don't. Easy message. Even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can understand it. Sarah Palin can buy into it, or ignore it. No death panels, no granny plugs, nothing. Just a few sentences.

Replace the "you must be disabled or 65" with "here's what it'll cost if you want to buy in, and here's the sliding scale of subsidies we'll give you if you're poor, paid for by everybody else who's buying in." (You could roll back the Reagan tax cuts and make it all free, but that's another rant.)

We elected you because we expected you to have the courage of your convictions. Here's how. Not the "single payer Medicare for all" that many of us would prefer, but a simple, "Medicare for anybody who wants to buy in."

Respectfully,

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

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Carelessly wonkering down at the microphony again, Shush compared President O-Balm-Ah to his own late uncle: A dolphin hitter in the illegal tuna trade. Truth be soldout, Shush had his own pecuniary propellers stuffed offshore, but never opened a can of tuna without thinking about his favorite Doppelgängler at Golden Sucks.

Teleconferencing in to his yesterday balkshow last week was Smarma Railin, an emerging quitter and fish gutter from up north in what is sometimes called the "pretend state," which I cannot prove, but I'll Aska. Smarma could talk the hind legs off a blue donkey, but no one had asked her for a mirth certificate. Consequently, she had fictitiously agreed without confirmation to participate in a nationally televised "Death Panel" on the merits of Greed Reform, regarding salaries worth their weight in rescinded health benefits.

Spinning for the Re-Pelicans wasn't all it was mocked-up to be for Shush, either in real time or rebroadcast through Smarma. (You can't hide those fry in eyes.) She abstractly twittered her worminal deathfish, concealed in the hanging pouch that had stretched out to store mendacity and extinct blinkered species.

Bouncing zealously around the Tele-Death-Panel, Shush obsessed about his disabling chub addiction and the high price of reeling in those azure equus asinii canum. Several interchangeable members of the Washington Wealth Insurance Lobby also phoned it in, solely to keep the cameras out of their grouper nets, or as in the case of socialism for the dickfish sector, to monopolize the board game and profit from a government one-off.

And though the game of medical inflation was fixed, real ectothermic commercial bloodsuckers accompanied by unemployed Americans on the corporate media trawler responded with a fierce sense of betrayal, like they had to the pandemic of swine flu, FISA farms, or unnecessary wars.

Wealthcare was obviously not for everyone. A flea-market ideology for the masses was all they could recommend. So the "Death Panel" members voted overwhelmingly to fully fund and authorize Nocialism.

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Now the citizens showing up screaming at "tea bag" parties, and town halls are clearly angry and afraid. The Republican politicians do little but fuel their concerns that Obama (Democrats) and "government," are taking on outrageous powers, and ruining the Constitution and the country.

I just have one question.

Where were these people and their concerns when George W. Bush and Company were forging the Unitary Executive?

I can tell you where they were. They were cheering BushCo. on. They were shouting "America, love it or leave it." They were calling those that were concerned about the shift of power to the Executive branch, and the deliberate refusal to any oversight of their actions, "terrorists" and "communists" and "conspiracy nuts." Some even loudly proclaimed that all us "kooks" should be locked up in Gitmo or killed.

These were the folks, who despite evidence of being lied into a war, and lied to about covert surveillance of Americans and a policy of torture, said "My country. Right or wrong, my country." Or even argued forcefully for the rightness of the authority Bush was taking, and for the tearing up of Constitutional protections to make us safe.

What has changed from their purported perspective? We are still at war. We are still under threat of terrorism at home and abroad. Al Qaeda is still operating, and new foes have arisen. Iran and North Korea are still defined as active nuclear threats. If these threats were what legitimated the embrace of power by the Bush administration, those conditions still exist.

If there was any consistency to the ideology of the right wing screamers, then they would not be screaming. Or if they are screaming now, they should have been screaming then.

If there was any consistency to the REPUBLICAN party line, then they should have been in outright revolt under George W. Bush. Not only was there not revolt, they were in lock-step supporting every abuse of power and shredding of the Constitution.

To say the least, all of this is disingenuous, but it is more than that. It is posing, fomenting, and manipulation of folks who are willing to be manipulated.

I am sick of the duplicity. I am sick of the lying. I am sick to death of the hatefulness of the fueling of people's fears to make them shock troops for corporate and party interests.

I'm just sick of the whole thing.

I have no idea how one addresses this insanity - for that is what it is. There are those who are the manipulators - the creators of lies and rhetoric - and they are serving their own ends. They know clearly what they are doing and are quite comfortable doing it. If they change, it will be for personal events that touch their lives. Then you have the people who are swayed and fueled by them. They have belief systems that frame their world providing a lens that consistently focuses one way. They will believe the manipulators, but there is no way through evidence or information to get them to reflect on that ideology. Evidence and information which conflicts with the ideology are just lies.

The manipulators have been pumping the rhetoric bellows overtime to fuel some people's fear and anger. They run the risk of pushing more people over the line into physical violence. I seriously doubt they are concerned about this. Why? Because the people's lives do not matter to them. At best, we are abstractions and certainly expendable. So a few folks get maimed or killed, and those actors also end up jailed or dead. All those lives are acceptable losses in the big struggle for power. There are many side benefits to the hate and the chaos. It raises questions among the non-extreme, and it intimidates many into silence. It hamstrings actual discussion and debate thereby strengthening the power of the rhetoric.

The only course of action is to be as honest as possible and to try to offer fact and information. For those who try to be informed, this will work. For those who avoid being informed, whatever they hear the most is what they are likely to believe. Therefore, doing the best we can to keep the mainstream media semi-accurate is perhaps the best we can do.

Perhaps the primary thing it is important to keep in mind is that people are people. Most of those who think that Obama and the Democrats are somehow stealing the country and bent on removing their "choices" are just folks. The manipulators are a different issue all together. However, the manipulators are not the ones protesting - those they see as expendable shock troops are.

Recommended:
No Cure For Stupid Liars. Natasha Cart. OpenLeft. 8/10/09.

Please Cut the Crap - site by Milt Shook.

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Among the luminaries arrested are:

A New Jersey assemblyman and the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus were among public officials arrested this morning by FBI agents in an international money laundering and corruption probe that includes rabbis in the Syrian Jewish communities of Deal and Brooklyn.

Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean), Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano, Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell and Jersey City Council President Mariano Vega are among those already brought to the FBI building in Newark. Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini has also been arrested.

The NJ.com article has several video clips for those who are interested.

According to the article at Forbes, the roundup included five rabbis from NJ and NY and the FBI raided a synagogue in Deal, NJ:

In rounding up the defendants, FBI and IRS agents raided a synagogue Thursday morning in Deal, a wealthy oceanfront city of Mediterranean-style mansions, with a large population of Syrian Jews.

Those arrested include Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn, who was charged with conspiring to arrange the sale of an Israeli citizen's kidney for $160,000 for a transplant for the informant's fictitious uncle. Rosenbaum was quoted as saying he had been arranging the sale of kidneys for 10 years.

The politicians arrested were not accused of any involvement in the money laundering or the trafficking in human organs and counterfeit handbags.

Also rounded up were a number of government employees (inspectors and others) who participated in the corruption, but were not part of the money laundering activities.

The money laundering ring stretched from the U.S. to Switzerland and Israel, with charities and non-profits being used.

From the Wall Street Journal:

In 2007, for example, Eliahu Ben Haim, the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob, a synagogue in the shore community of Deal, accepted a $50,000 check from the cooperating witness, which was drawn from an account held by a fictitious company set up by the FBI "for the purpose of enabling [the cooperating witness] to launder money represented to be the proceeds of illegal activities," according to one criminal complaint. Mr. Ben Haim was named as a co-conspirator in court documents. The check was made payable to one of Mr. Ben Haim's charitable organisations "with the expectation that the proceeds would be returned to the [cooperating witness] at a later date, minus a ten percent fee to be retained by Co-conspirator Ben Haim."

Besides Mr. Ben Haim, the charged rabbis include Edmond Nahum, the principal rabbi of Deal Synagogue; Saul Kassin, a rabbi at Shaare Zion Congregation in the New York borough of Brooklyn; Mordchai Fish, a rabbi at a Brooklyn synagogue, Congregation Sheves Achim; and his brother, Lavel Schwartz, also a rabbi.

So we have a sordid tale of politicians, commissioners, government employees, and rabbis variously engaged in money laundering, selling counterfeit pursues, and trafficking in human organs. What is not clear at all is where that money was going and for what purpose.

Here is the link to the criminal complaint filed against current Mayor Cammarano and Utilities Commissioner Peter Schaffer

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A government that should have prevented the current recession but did not and now has spent horrendous amounts of money that has largely been wasted. A government that has put many future generations in debt. A government that makes a mockery out of the concept of democracy.

As Robert J. Samuelson has aptly said, the federal $787 billion stimulus package is "mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes. As a result, much of the stimulus's potential benefit has been squandered."

The result is that most Americans hit hard by the recession have seen very few meaningful benefits. Unemployment not only has mounted, but will surely keep increasing and may well approach 15 percent nationally. Indeed, it is already that bad in some places, like Michigan.

If there was ever something that should have sparked a Second American Revolution it is the Goldman Sachs story in this recession. Goldman Sachs reported that it earned $3.44 billion in the second quarter, and is preparing its largest bonus payout in history. Did this company with so many former executives running the federal government's financial system manage this strictly on its own merits? Not exactly. It received a $10 billion injection of TARP funds to help it handle the fiscal crisis. It was allowed to convert itself into a commercial bank and member of the Federal Reserve system, gaining access to low or zero cost capital at the Fed Discount window and access to federally guaranteed borrowing through the FDIC Temporary Liquidity Guaranty Program. And it had the good fortune (literally) to receive a $13 billion payout of federal dollars at one hundred cents on the dollar for its outstanding credit default swap contracts with AIG.

Was all this recession garbage the change we were waiting for? Have we seen anything other than politics as usual? No.

The whole Obama story and the Democratic control of Congress are a disgrace. Progressives who eagerly supported Obama should be ashamed of themselves. They should be leading a revolution, not make excuses for Obama and the Democrats.

The icing on the corruption cake will probably be phony and delusional health care reform, as stupid and deceptive as all the federal efforts at reversing the recession. It could not be clearer that most Democrats are totally under the thrall of the health insurance industry. How do you explain the incontrovertible fact that even though the US spends more money per capita on health care than any other nation we have some of the worst health statistics of any nation? Simple. A huge fraction of the national spending on health care goes to the private health insurance industry. Does the US offer some of the very best health care in the world? Yes, but unless you are wealthy or have terrific health insurance, like members of Congress have, you will not have affordable access to that terrific health care. So our national statistics stink because such a huge fraction of the population does not get the first rate health care.

When he campaigned Obama said he supported single payer universal health care. But not now. Unless we get rid of the dominant private health insurance industry and replace it with an extension of Medicare, we will not get true and necessary reform. Nor will we really see decreases in health care costs. Nor will all people get effective health insurance.

As I feared, Obama and the Democrat controlled Congress are giving us government gone mad, exactly what most Americans deserve. Don't hold your breath for the populist revolution.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com]

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How long has it been since you have heard a discussion of peace? It has become a rare commodity over the last decade - perhaps decades. The only political discussion of peace was during the last campaign was Dennis Kucinich being laughed out of candidacy with his "Department of Peace." It has been so long since any serious discussion of "peace on Earth" that I would guess that for many peace isn't even a thought. In the U.S. - and perhaps the rest of the world - we have become so inured to war that we seem to think it is an inevitable and natural state.

I am not going to make an argument that the world does not have a history of warfare. However, I do not believe that a history of warfare proves the argument of the natural inevitability of war. War is a choice. As a choice, it means that humans could make different choices.

There is a good reason why even thoughts of peace seem to have fled the public dialog. Namely, that there is big money in weapons and war. I highly recommend Mother Jones's special report "Shock and Audit" which is an analysis of the Defense Budget and where it is going. The short story is that more and more dollars are going to "defense" spending. A significant portion of this financing growth is the continued expansion of U.S. global military presence (see MoJo's interactive map Mission Creep: US Military Presence Worldwide).

So the path we are on does not seem to be focusing on peace, but focusing on endless, global, military conflict. Still, there seems to be (at best) muted complaints about framing our present and future within the context of endless war. The horror of that does not seem to sink in. I believe this is due to the spinning of war technology. U.S. war technology development seems to be headed towards involving fewer soldiers and more "remote" technologies. While this may reduce the number of U.S. troops lost and permanently injured, it definitely does not lessen the footprint of those wars where it tromps.

The remote technologies range from robotic weapons platforms patrolling streets, to weaponized drones flying overhead, to space-based laser (and energy) weapons platforms which can strike anywhere on the planet. Since the video game-esque presentation of the first Iraq War (Desert Storm), the U.S. public has been sold a bill of goods about "smart" weapons and "precision" weaponry. What is kept as distant as possible is that these weapons are neither "smart" or "precise," and that civilians are constantly on the receiving end of them. Obama has apparently embraced the defense establishment hype and has expanded the "drone" attacks across Afghanistan and Pakistan - and also expanded the non-combatant toll of those weapons.

The other major area of development is the creation of the super soldier (or as the DoD prefers to call them - "future war fighters"). This line of pursuit engages in various degrees and types of technologies that either meld "war fighter" and machine externally (through robotics) or internally (through nanotechnology and the implantation of weapons and systems control devices in the "war fighter"). Another line of development is to improve the war fighter through biotech and genetic options which would allow things from rapid muscle repair/recovery to being able to digest cellulose (from boxes to grasses) so that time in the field without resupply can be extended.

Instead of discussing where we are going, our leaders continue to create more incentives to grow the military investment. The "military-industrial complex" is increasingly diverse and more an more private contractors take over former military tasks - from food services, to strategic monitoring, to mercenary forces. We are rapidly becoming (if we are not already) an economy with the war complex at its hub.

In his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower' spoke of the dangers of the war machine that had been created (See end of article for quote and video). He stated that we must guard against this powerful military industry dominating our society. We have failed to heed that warning. Instead, through careful manipulation and strategic rhetoric we have not only come to embrace the war machine, but to accept the "need" for it, and the naturalness of war.

Perpetual war has become completely merged with a fatal belief in "capitalism." We have been sold an ideology that idolizes the "benefits" of capitalism - particularly its "efficiencies" driven by "free market competition." Meanwhile, government is presented as "bloated," "wasteful," and "corrupt." We are led to believe in the inherent "badness" of government combined with the assumption that "business" is self-regulating. While the debacle of the current global economic meltdown should have debunked the myth of "efficiency" and market "self-regulation," it apparently has not. There is little broad public discussion of the fact that the economic meltdown is the result of monopoly capitalism seeking the most "profit" imaginable while "free market" governmental believers turned a blind eye to regulating or controlling the "excesses" of capitalism.

Perhaps because this lesson is being missed, or perhaps because the connection is not made, we are incentivizing permanent war. More and more privatization of the military leads to more incentives (profits) from never ending war. Just as privatizing jails and prisons creates an environment to "grow the market" (increase the number of prisoners and the length of detentions), so privatizing the military creates an environment for more war.

Government is not a business. The activities it engages in (in part) are to address social needs that are not necessarily profitable. Increasingly, it needs to engage in meeting social needs that are dangerous when placed in the private market sphere. We are seeing this with the argument about health care, and we should be discussing it in relationship to defense (and other charges of government). Instead, where the concerns about capitalism occur, it is to pose government as a necessary competitor to the private sphere. This is an underlying argument of the "public option" in health care reform. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that the U.S. government has been argued to be a necessary competitor to bring U.S. industry back to competitive capitalism. In part, it shows how weak the monopoly barriers have become that the only agency big enough to offer corporate competition is the government of the United States.

The expansion of militarism and imperialism (soft or blatant) is following the same course with looming disastrous consequences. We need to seriously discuss the reality of perpetual war and the profit driven industry that is being created. We need to challenge the rhetoric of never ending conflict and that we can engage in "neat" wars. They are not, and never will be "neat." They will always bear the costs of blood and life, deadly environments, and decimation of human connection and community.

A peace movement arose under the whip of the "war on terrorism." It seems to have gone back to sleep with the election of Barack Obama. While there are numerous fronts on which people are struggling right now, it is critical that the peace movement be highly visible and loud. Obama and Congress are expanding the financing of the defense industry. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still being supplemented by "emergency" funding despite promises they would be transparently included in the federal budget.

We have a world at stake with the crises of energy, environmental destruction, and climate chaos. We need each other to meet these challenges if we are going to survive. We have the best bases in the world to come together peacefully than at any time in human history - our very survival. I firmly believe that our ability to successfully meet these challenges rests in peace - not war. We have a choice to make - peace or assured destruction (which will be profitable for a few).

Related Articles
DARPA 2010 Budget Estimates 471 pages pdf.

Injectable bio-chips ... hmm. Wolf, Uncommon Thought Journal. 12/30/2003.

War Without End & Now ... the Permanent Soldier. Wolf, Uncommon Thought Journal. 5/18/2009.

A Visit to DARPA-land. Wolf. Uncommon Thought Journal. 5/15/2009.

Quote from Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organisation today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognise the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

YouTube

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The following video was taken from a presentation by Stuart Brown who founded the National Institute for Play. The pictures are from reknowned nature photographer Norbert Rosing taken on an expedition to Canada's Hudson Bay in 2006.

Animals at Play from Speaking of Faith on Vimeo.

It is interesting to run into the National Institute for Play, as one of my all time favorite books is Playing by Heart by O. Fred Donaldson. The video from Rosing's pictures epitomizes play in its most natural state.

Thanks to Bill for sharing this with me.

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Below is the introduction to the report - just the introduction because it forms the framework and tone for the rest of the plan.

Over the past two years we have faced the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Americans across the nation are struggling with unemployment, failing businesses, falling home prices, and declining savings. These challenges have forced the government to take extraordinary measures to revive our financial system so that people can access loans to buy a car or home, pay for a child's education, or finance a business.

While the first two sentences are accurate, the conclusion is questionable. The problem for most in the United States is not getting loans, but what is happening to the loans that they already have. Credit card rates jumping through the roof, mortgage loans resetting, the popping of the housing bubble devaluing homes below the loan levels.

The roots of this crisis go back decades. Years without a serious economic recession bred complacency among financial intermediaries and investors. Financial challenges such as the near-failure of Long-Term Capital Management and the Asian Financial Crisis had minimal impact on economic growth in the U.S., which bred exaggerated expectations about the resilience of our financial markets and firms. Rising asset prices, particularly in housing, hid weak credit underwriting standards and masked the growing leverage throughout the system.

While the roots of the current crisis does go back decades, there have been crashes that should have caused caution - such as the crash of 2000 and the long "jobless recovery." What this indicated was that financiers were gaining, but the American people were not. A recovery that does not include the people is not a "recovery," it is profit-making.

I do not believe that the "exaggerated expectations" were about "resilience" but about the ability to accrue excess value indefinitely.

Rising home values signalled a housing bubble, and all honest economists knew that. It did not "mask" the growing leverage in the system, it depended on the growing leverage in the system

At some of our most sophisticated financial firms, risk management systems did not keep pace with the complexity of new financial products. The lack of transparency and standards in markets for securitized loans helped to weaken underwriting standards. Market discipline broke down as investors relied excessively on credit rating agencies. Compensation practices throughout the financial services industry rewarded short-term profits at the expense of long-term value.

It is clear at this point, that risk management systems were not trying to keep pace, but rewriting their risk calculations to facilitate the process of limitless profit-taking.

While "lack of transparency" was (and is) a problem, it was no accident. The negligence was deliberate and systematic. Saying that "market discipline broke down" assumes that the market could ever discipline itself. It is clear, and has been clear since the early 1900s that the market has no discipline. Given the opportunity to act in an unfettered manner, it will follow the greatest opportunities for profit.

Households saw significant increases in access to credit, but those gains were overshadowed by pervasive failures in consumer protection, leaving many Americans with obligations that they did not understand and could not afford.

Households saw significant increases in access to credit as wages fell further short of the ability to increase consumption. The people took on massive debt to support a system that was extracting greater and greater profit with the facilitation of federal deregulation. There were not just "failures in consumer protection," but passage of legislation that removed those protections.

While this crisis had many causes, it is clear now that the government could have done more to prevent many of these problems from growing out of control and threatening the stability of our financial system. Gaps and weaknesses in the supervision and regulation of financial firms presented challenges to our government's ability to monitor, prevent, or address risks as they built up in the system. No regulator saw its job as protecting the economy and financial system as a whole. Existing approaches to bank holding company regulation focused on protecting the subsidiary bank, not on comprehensive regulation of the whole firm. Investment banks were permitted to opt for a different regime under a different regulator, and in doing so, escaped adequate constraints on leverage. Other firms, such as AIG, owned insured depositories, but escaped the strictures of serious holding company regulation because the depositories that they owned were technically not "banks" under relevant law.

This is a disgusting soft-peddling of the realities of this situation. Legislation was passed that allowed financial related industries to merge and expand in unprecedented ways. The boundaries between types of financial institutions were removed. Controls and oversight were weakened or removed. The Federal Reserve under Greenspan, and a series of representatives in Washington, took a "hands off" approach to the financial sector - purportedly under the theory that markets could regulate themselves better than government could regulate. It was the ultimate test of laissez faire, and it failed.

This collapse was facilitated. It was not a "failure." If one gets a car, removes the brakes and the steering wheel, and hops up the engine, it is not a "design flaw" when the car crashes - it is sabotage.

We must act now to restore confidence in the integrity of our financial system. The lasting economic damage to ordinary families and businesses is a constant reminder of the urgent need to act to reform our financial regulatory system and put our economy on track to a sustainable recovery. We must build a new foundation for financial regulation and supervision that is simpler and more effectively enforced, that protects consumers and investors, that rewards innovation and that is able to adapt and evolve with changes in the financial market.

One has to ask "Restore whose confidence"? And one has to ask "What integrity"? There was not been integrity in the financial sector forever. Whatever "integrity" there has been is in keeping the financial sector in check and honest. Whose confidence do we wish to build? Is it the confidence of the populace that they will not be bilked, exploited, and stolen from? Or is it the confidence of "investors" that they will return to a market that will get them high gains? Is the plan to restore the failed system yet reduce the amount of profit taking, or is it to build an economy that works for the people? All signs point to the former.

Institutions that were too big to fail are now fewer, but even larger. Institutions were bailed out (and continue to be bailed out) while the people are totally neglected. Why have people in Detroit lost their homes while those same homes are sold in blocks to investors for as little as $8000 a piece? If financial institutions are going to take that kind of loss, then why not refinance to the existing owner at that same valuation? Why remove the mark-to-market valuation on banks so their books look better, and then let them steal people's homes and sell them for a song.

What is happening here is a massive and direct transfer of wealth. It is being facilitated and subsidized by those same officials who are "stabilizing" the market.

The basic premises of this plan are troublesome to me. There is an assumption that everything was working fine and then some unfortunate things happened. There is an assumption that "things just changed too fast" for regulations to keep up. We all know that this is not the case. We all know that there were deliberate actions and decisions which brought us, and our economy, to this collapse. Many would argue that simply patching up the system that failed is not adequate. In fact, that such an attempt will result in a duplication of the collapse we are still in.

Mr. Obama, welcome to the "no mud sticks if you don't throw it" world of corporate owned Washington D.C.

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However, there is a different story of the tennis ball. It was told to me by a dear friend (now departed) who had lineage back to the early dingos. She passed the story on to me saying that it had passed via species memory to her.

Grady was an afficianado of tennis balls. She always loved them - to chew on, to chase, to bounce off her nose. Every tennis ball was her ball, and she never lost a tennis ball in her life. She always knew where each one was - even those that ended up behind the bookcase from the discouraged indoor playing of ball.

Having deep experience with her love, and indeed obsession, with tennis balls, I asked her once what was the deal. She told me this story.

Long, long, ago her great great great (bunch of greats) grandmother Surí (pronounced sue - ree) had an idea.  She needed a multipurpose implement for pups and adults for training, exercise, and entertainment.  And it had to be useful for training humans as well. Surí thought long and hard and came up with the requirements for her tool.

Requirements

•     Right size for her people's mouths
•     Chewable and flexible
•     Hide or fur to massage the gums and clean the teeth
•     Keep the kids occupied while the adults went about adult business
•     It needed to "skitter" for skill building and entertainment purposes
•     Durable
•     Attractive to humans

Surí was of dingo ancestry, and like Grady carried the deep knowledge of the dingos. She knew that all creation starts in the dream world. So Surí set the requirements of the tool firmly in mind and entered the Dream World. In the Dream World she walked and walked. She crossed the land constantly looking for what would meet her requirements. She traveled a long way, grew tired and thirsty, but she kept her requirements constantly at the forefront of her mind. Finally, something plopped down on the sand in front of her. It was a round object that seemed to be made from some small animal. It was round, and rolled directly under her feet. Surí stepped back and circled the object that seemed to have dropped from the sky. She observed it closely, and then moved in and touched it with her paw. It seemed relatively firm, and did not seem to be alive. So, she smacked it with her foot and it skittered away. Surí smiled.

She then bent her head down and picked it up. It was firm, but had some give under her teeth. She lay down with the Dream World gift and gave an experimental chew or two. It seemed very close to what she had come to the Dream World to find. She got up and put the gift back down, and studied every aspect of it. Once it was set firmly in her mind Surí left the Dream World.

Now she knew what she needed, but had no way of making it herself. She needed a human to actually create the tool. She turned to her pet human Resa. She had a clear idea of what she would do next.

She waited for Resa to go to sleep and then insinuated herself into Resa's dream. She called up the exact specifications of the gift from the Dream World. Placed it in her mind, and trotted up to Resa. Surí dropped the gift in front of Resa and yipped. Resa looked and walked on. Picking up the gift, Surí trotted along until Resa tired and she sat down on a rock under a tree. Surí placed the gift in Resa's lap and backed off wagging her tail.  Resa picked up the gift and looked at it, turned it over in her hands. Surí yipped, wagged harder, and backed up a few more steps. Finally, Resa tossed the gift in Surí's direction. Surí caught it and placed it back in Resa's lap and went through the entire procedure again and again.

Morning came and Resa awoke. The day went on as usual, and no gift was produced. Night after night Surí entered Resa's dreams and introduced the gift. Surí waited, but there was no movement of the gift from the Dream World to this world. So Surí tried to figure another way. Finally, she realized that humans seemed to be a bit self absorbed. She thought that if she could make the gift seem like something useful to humans that Resa might make the gift for herself. So Surí invented a human game where humans would use the gift to play with each other. They could use some sort of bat to chase around and smack the gift back and forth.  With this idea firmly in mind, Surí waited for Resa to sleep and then entered her dream and planted the idea. She stressed the idea of people laughing and playing and being companionable.

The next morning Resa awoke with a smile on her face. She spent the day gathering materials and in the evening sat down and made the gift and two "rackets". Surí was ecstatic.

The next day she followed Resa as she went to her friend's home and showed her the gift and the "rackets" and explained her (Resa's) idea. She and her friend played the game with the gift. They had fun and said they would do it again tomorrow. Resa and Surí went home and Surí couldn't wait to actually get hold of the gift. So she was highly disappointed when Resa put the gift and the rackets away where Surí could not get to them. Clearly there was more work to do.

So night after night Surí would enter Resa's dreams to get her to play with Surí with the gift. Finally one day as Resa and her friend rested in the shade after playing their game, Resa threw the gift - just as Surí had shown her repeated times. Surí chased down the gift and brought it immediately back to reinforce the real purpose of the gift.

Hence was born the game of tennis and the tennis ball.

But the story did not end there.

Many, many years later another descendent of Surí's by the name of Samuel had a pet human named Walter Wingfield. Carrying the genetic memory of Surí', but living in the time of the invention of rubber, Samuel thought that the gift could be improved. So Samuel drew up his requirements given modern materials, entered the dream world, and waited for his desire to materialize. Ultimately it did, and Samuel made careful observations of this new tennis ball. He then took that gift into Walter's dreams. To make a long story short, Walter invented the modern game of lawn tennis and got Charles Goodyear to produce the tennis balls for it.

Grady stopped her story and looked at me. I said "That's it?"

Grady: Yes

Me: So the tennis ball as well as the game of tennis was invented by your ancestor Surí'?

Grady: Yes.

Me: And another ancestor Samuel invented the modern tennis ball and lawn tennis?

Grady: Yes.

Me: So where does the training humans come in?

Grady: Playing fetch is elementary training of humans to be responsive to our cues. If they can play fetch, then they are trainable. (She paused expectantly and tilted her head)

Me: I take it you want to play now?

Grady laughed and flew out the door shouting over her shoulder "You're trainable!"

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In a perfect world, people would not starve by the road while others own private roads.

In a perfect world, the color of one's skin, the sex of one's birth, the direction of one's affections; the religion one follows, the economic level of one's family, would not set one's course to security or exploitation.

In a perfect world, we would not fight endless wars over resources.

In a perfect world, no one would need an army or a bomb or an automatic weapon.

In a perfect world, people would not need drugs to buffer themselves from their existence.

In a perfect world, we would not be debating competing rights between fetuses and mothers because women would be seen as equal in consideration to the life that they bear; women would have autonomy in their lives; children would be valued by the community; there would be birth control for men and women; and ... and.

In a perfect world, when we said "life isn't fair" the unfairness would not be constructed by the society we live in.

But we don't live in a perfect world.

Some would argue that means we should just get along and go along.
For others, it is a farcical concept.
For some it means that we need to engage our hearts, minds, and hands in constructing a social existence that moves us towards a perfect world.

Will we achieve that world? Perhaps not. I am certainly not a utopian idealist. However, I am very aware that we have created the world we are in. We have created the cruelty. We have created the inequality and destruction. It was not visited upon us. It is not an "accident" or part of the "human condition."

Nope, we made it.

True, what we have made has also made us captives to a certain extent. We have become dependent upon destruction and exploitation for the survival of some at the cost of many.

However, it must be possible to break that captivity. It must be possible to change.

In fact, if we do not change what we have created, humanity may be but a footprint in the sand that was here and gone between waves.

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In my life I have gone through and still live with some very painful conditions. This condition has brought me to a place of the philosophy of pain. It has made me recognize something that I was never conscious of before - that is, each type of pain has its own character - almost a personality. Medical professionals have developed the pain scale (1-10). They ask questions about the nature of the pain - dull, sharp, burning. And about the duration of the pain - shocking, intermittent, constant. All of this communicates general information about the pain, but somehow it does not capture the experience.

I must say that explaining the nature of the pain of this current condition has stripped me of words to describe it. How does one describe how weird it feels to have pain that runs to the midline of your face and stops at the middle of your nose. To have extreme pain inside your left nostril, but feel absolutely normal millimeters away?

Fear not, I am not going to wax elegant about the pain of this condition, but hopefully this is adequate to help you see why trying to understand the nature and message of pain might become a past time.

In treating this condition, the neurologist placed me on an anti-seizure medication. This is supposed to calm the nerve and at least temporarily resolve the issue. This is unlike pain medication which can help with the pain, but does not address the condition. The doctor informed me of the side effects of this drug - namely drowsiness and that I might experience some effect on my thinking. I had no idea what was in store for me.

The medication did a bit more than make me drowsy. It knocked me out for hours at a time. It did impact my thinking. I felt like I was struggling up a mountain of sand to grasp at thoughts that somehow broke apart and skittered in different directions. Clearly I felt that the drug was not just "calming" the nerves, but "calming" my thoughts. Emotionally, it made me feel flat, to depressed, to absent. Functioning at all was an act of will that left me crying in despair on a daily basis.

Then I had a significant allergic reaction to the drug. I broke out in a body wide rash. I contacted my doctor who told me to stop the medication immediately.
By the middle of the next day, much of the medication had apparently left my brain. All of a sudden I had my brain back. My thoughts seemed lightening quick. I could put thoughts together without struggling. I felt that suddenly I was flying where hours before I had trudged under an unbearable weight. The change was more than striking, and that is truly what prompts this writing.

I knew how I was struggling under the medication. What being freed of it did was to give me a deep felt appreciation for how my brain (and likely most folk's brains) works. I so took for granted the facility of thinking. The ability to easily make conceptual leaps. I took for granted (except in a philosophical way) how much of my self is in my brain, and how much its processes and expression I take for granted.

Now, for at least this brief moment in time, I grasp how amazing this gift of self and thought are. Like the pain that I experience, this too is almost beyond description. I have no thought scale, no intensity or duration scales that have some communication standard that is even ball park shared. Does it make sense that my mind felt like a fresh spring breeze full of the smells of earth and growing things? Does it make any sense to say that my mind went from the sloth on a hot day to a kestrel diving through mountain air? Does it make any sense to say that my emotions felt like sludge in a pipe to a babbling brook dancing across the rocks?

Soon, when this drug reaction resolves, the doctor will want to try me on the next drug on the list. As it too will be the same category of drug, it is likely to produce the same effects. This time, I find that thought more realistically frightening than I did with the first medication. In proceeding with the treatment, I am willing to accept confining my "self" to a dim prison; consenting in the hobbling of my thoughts and emotions. I will consent to this treatment because it might cure, at least temporarily, this condition that gives me such difficultly to describe, and even more difficult to address, pain. This time I will know the cost to me, and I will hope that the medication does not steal too much of me, and that what is stolen will come back.

This experience has been more than educational. It has been a journey that has quest-like overtones.

I know that others of you have taken, or are currently on, such an unbidden journey. I have learned through previous experiences that there is something to be learned of our selves and the nature of things. This particular journey has taken me on unexpected and unknown turns which I am still struggling to understand. No other previous experience has given me the deep felt sense of appreciation for who it is that lives inside me. I hope that sharing this experience gives you an increased appreciation for what most of us takes for granted every day - the basic working of our self.

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I do not know the origins of these images so thanks to whoever in the world put this together.

THIS IS INDIA . IT'S WHERE YOU CALL WHEN YOU HAVE A TECHNICAL PROBLEM WITH YOUR COMPUTER.

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Now let's say that in this stress test we allowed you to decide on your own level of debt. For example, you are obliged to pay off that long term loan, but if all goes well you hope to pay that off within the next year. So, let's knock that amount off the list. And that home loan? Well, you're currently paying $1,000 a month, but if you get this loan you will be paying $850 a month. So let's take that figure. Clearly, such assumptions and choices on your part MIGHT misrepresent your financial situation.

Now let's stress test those financial institutions. However it was that the Obama administration originally wanted to test the banks, the banks didn't like. So the banks pushed back. Effectively, they got the calculations of capital needed changed. This is a nice trick if you can do it - and they successfully did it.

But even before the stress test they got something else changed - the way they value their assets. Rather than providing the market value of the mortgages they held, they could provide what they think those assets are worth in a non-distressed market:

Bankers bitterly complained that the current market prices were the result of distressed sales and that they should be allowed to ignore those prices and value the securities instead at their value in a normal market. At first FASB, pronounced FAS-bee, resisted making changes, but that changed within a few days of a Congressional hearing at which legislators from both parties demanded the board act.

Even given the change in accounting rules, and whatever other changes in the "test" that was won by the banks, nine of them still failed. Oh excuse me, they didn't "fail," they did not pass the test. Oh EXCUSE ME! All 19 Banks Pass Stress Tests ("But many require new capital infusions to stay solvent). That little gem is from"Consumer Affairs." In a sop to those we generally think of as "consumers," the article states:

Consumers shouldn't be concerned that their bank was deemed to need more money. Even if a bank failed, deposits of up to $250,000 are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Besides, the whole idea behind the stress test was to make sure than none of the 19 banks fail.

So what are the consequences for banks who failed, excused me, did not pass, excuse me, passed but could be better? (And people yell about the schools not being tough and honest with students). Well, according to an article at the BBC - "Ten US banks fail 'stress tests' " (emphasis mine):

The treasury secretary said he believed that while the majority of the banks would be able to raise any additional money they need from private sources, if they were unable to do so the government may have to provide them with more taxpayer money.

Well that's telling them!
(Read in a stern and parental voice) "Correct those deficiencies or the taxpayer will give you more money!"

Other pertinent articles

Stress Tests for Beginners. The Baseline Scenario. 5/04/09.

The Mark-to-Market Myth. The Baseline Scenario. 4/02/09.

Fed: Banks Tighten Lending Standards Further. Calculated Risk. 5/04/09. These charts are instructive.

Government Offers Details of Bank Stress Test. Andrews & Dash. NY Times, 2/25/09. (But the article does not)

Stress Test for Banks Exposes Rift on Wall St.. Dash. NY Times, 2/24/09. (Actually pretty good given the successful change to accounting valuing changes)

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There are three things about this flu that should have people concerned.

1. It combines three viruses - swine, avian, and human.
2. It strikes children and young adults.
3. It went global very quickly.

1. While the current version of this flu seems to have a lower mortality rate than originally believed, the combination of viruses is troubling. One of the big fears about the more lethal form of the "Avian Flu" has been that it would combine with a human flu virus and become directly communicable between humans. This version of the avian virus seems to have "figured" that out. It is logical to assume that the more lethal variant could potentially attach to, or "learn" from, this cousin.

2. It is worrisome that this flu strikes the group that is generally less likely to suffer from the flu (or at least to be seriously impacted by "the flu"). The typical high risk groups are the very young, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems. This flu apparently strikes children and the prime breeding population. IF it increased in lethality, then the impacts would disproportionately hit the most fertile group and the "next" generation. Now if one thinks that this might be a positive thing in terms of our population "problem," then that might be. However, my guess is a lethal virus that hit 15-30 year olds would be responded to with intense grief, fear, and anger.

3. The spread of this virus shows how easily a virus can spread across the planet. One good thing about the reporting is to show just how vulnerable we are to a pandemic situation. Further, that by the time we realize that there is a problem it is likely too late to stop a global spread.

So, is asking people to isolate themselves, closing schools, etc. a rational response, or an over-response? I would argue that it is a prudent in many situations. The more people who have this virus, the more opportunity there is for the virus to evolve or mutate. If we can control the spread of this virus, it gives researchers the opportunity to figure it out - and perhaps develop a vaccine. If it goes through rapid (or continuing) transformation, then responding to it becomes increasingly difficult. Much of this year's "flu" was immune to the antivirals. What happens if this H1N1 learns that little trick? It could you know. So caution is prudent, while panic certainly is not.

I am quite upset at the way this has (or has not) been addressed in the media. The public perceptions set up a situation where people are likely to discount or not respond to the next health event. After all "it was no big deal" this time. A bit of information would go a long way to address this situation. The reality is that the "regular flu" kills about 36,000 - 50,000 people every year (the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S.). A flu epidemic like the Swine Flu of 1918 would result in approximately 2 million deaths in the United States.

Given that, how do you want the U.S. government (and local schools) to respond to a potentially virulent "flu?" I would prefer they err on the side of caution.

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Love is the most powerful and possibly the most natural of all human emotions. We like to believe that we believe in love, yet we live in fear of it. We fear that giving means someone else is taking, that we or they won't live up to expectations, that we will be left. Trust in the 'system', 'friends' and 'society' seems to come easier than in ourselves or the ones which we supposedly 'love' so we put up our defenses and shoot down anyone or anything that gets close to seeing through them and essentially into us.

Singly and with the 'support' of those which we 'allow' some influence in our lives, we resist 'change'. Saying things like "I have to be true to myself" or hearing things like "don't change for anyone"; what we really resist is our own evolution, our own ability to 'come together'. The 'change' and the 'sharing' which naturally occurs in a 'relationship' can grow and makes us uneasy, for we are taught to trust no one as they may be 'bad' and take something from us. So we run in search of what love 'should be' without ever giving a chance for love 'to be'.

We seem to search for something or someone that will 'give' as much or more than we are able to without really looking at ourselves and our own limits on 'giving' and 'receiving'; for even when we 'get' we still feel ashamed for not 'giving' as much and when we give we feel anger when we don't seem to receive to our satisfaction. We don't want to feel 'ripped off' so we become afraid to talk in fear of opening ourselves up to disappointment and laying ourselves bare and vulnerable and love never really gets the chance to flourish and grow; never gets the chance to change us into the more humanistic people which this world needs in order to change itself. Apart, we can all be afraid, together we can all gather strength to move forward and overcome challenges of life, human interaction and the world.

We 'fake' our way through life and human relationships, picking out and 'evaluating' our circumstances and concentrating on the 'uncomfortable' moments in our lives until we can bear them no longer; we then simply discard and move on, relishing the 'new' and yet to be 'broken'. Be it lovers, friends, work, homes, family or society we run away from it all but what we can not run away from is ourselves. We practice 'corporate' breakups using the same cold methods of analysis (have I gotten as much or more than I have given?) without talking and forever heaving blame (to others and ourselves), we rationalize leaving and move on to the next model in hopes that this will be the 'one' until even the new wears on our nerves and seems 'broken' to us. Never really feeling but rather being enamored with the concept of couple-hood and love.

I spent my entire life with the 'negative' aspects of love, never really giving in fear of 'the end' or of my own 'worthiness'. I tried to be a 'rock' because men don't cry but we don't have to become hard and strong for each other, for as a 'strong' self' we can never be as powerful as a loving community and if we continue to search for a 'perfect' state of being, we will always be disappointed.

There is no longer unconditional love, for nothing lasts forever in our 'upgrade' lives. We deem things as too much work, that there has to be something or someone easier, so we 'move on'; never really allowing ourselves to be the 'good' people that we so need to be. We search for perfection without ever believing in utopia and accepting what society has to offer. I don't want a 'perfect' love or a perfect world because I will never feel worthy from the start. Love is something that is work, something that grows and does change people, once we realize that and accept it, then maybe we can be humble enough to truly experience what love and life has to offer; then we may be able to move into a more human existence.

I ask of everyone to ask themselves - What happened to 'us'?

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I could see all of the joys disappearing and being taken away from us. I focused on it, I tried to make others see in hopes that they could be angry enough to do something. I found that they can instead concentrate so much on the negative that they find themselves seeing everything as bad and desperately reaching for the 'joy' that is portrayed or that which they had in their life.

It took me a long time and some unbelievable pain (my own and that which I inflicted) to realize that it was not the world that I hated, but myself. I drowned myself in the pain that I had been harboring all of my life and fueled it with the problems which I saw in the world. I did not realize until it was too late that my fire had burned everyone that I had ever known and cared about.

It is so easy to concentrate on the negative; we are, after all, a society built upon blame, responsibility and punishment. We see people as invading our space, trying to change us, not pulling their weight, potential thieves or terrorists and we close off our loving, caring and understanding.

We walk down the street and judge people by their looks and what they wear, we listen to conversations and judge people for what they say (and I was a huge player in this one), we judge them by their jobs, education, children, past mistakes and just about everything else that we can. Well I found that this also divides and makes us grow further apart.

I never gave life a real chance, I never gave people a real chance; I was always too afraid of becoming 'one of them' that I ignored the beauty in everyone and lashed out in hopes of not caring.

I digress, I don't know what to do or think anymore, I know though, that I cannot hurt anymore; not myself and not others. This blog has been so angry for so long, I have been so angry for so long. I still believe that everyone needs help but I will try to do it with a little more tenderness. I see now that my judgments hurt and that I have been judging for so long.

I would like to send a sincere apology to those that I have hurt in my life and to those that I have not, I wish you well but please try to see within yourselves the power of humanistic change.

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From the Reagan "revolution" forward, the Republicans have maneuvered to weaken government and place power in the hands of the capitalists. They have done this under the guise of protecting our "freedom," and in the process they engineered the theft of the government from the people. Along the way, they had the assistance of neo-liberals who jumped on the "free" trade band wagon. It has been known for a very long period of time that unfettered capitalism would eventually (or cyclically) result in a train wreck. AND IT HAS.

This "gang" also facilitated the undermining of the Constitution, destruction of civil liberties, and transfer of power to the executive branch under George W. Bush to support the farce of "Unitary Executive. The Republicans moved in lock-step to give Bush as much power as he wanted (or could take) with no objection whatsoever. They endorsed torture, corporatizing the military, and clapped as the largest bureaucracy the world has ever seen was created under the auspices the "Department of Homeland Security." The signed away OUR rights and OUR honor with a smile and a flag wave. They grew the K-Street crew and pocketed the payoffs serving their new employers rather than protecting the interests or serving the needs of their constituents.

Now. NOW. They have the gall to say that OBAMA is "infringing" on the "rights of private business." Now. NOW. they shout like terrorized parrots, that OBAMA is running rampant over the people (read the capitalists). Now. NOW. They shout in repetitious fashion, of this terrible "threat" to our nation.

I say "Shut the f up! You have NO basis and NO credibility. Your transparent efforts to continue on the failed course that you have pursued is bankrupting the country. Your cries of alarm and anger are worse than hypocritical - they are treasonous. So shut the f up!"

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In his piece in the Saturday NY Times, he states:

Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall -- when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more."

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can't do this anymore.

So Greenspan says that his ideology of market self-regulation is "flawed," and Friedman says we went down the wrong path. Gee thanks guys. A lot of us have been trying to say exactly this for a long period of time and have been labeled "commies," "socialists," and outright "unamerican."

An apology to all of us and the world would be nice.

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Consider: by 2005, the trade imbalance between China and the United States was 202 billion dollars, having multiplied nearly twenty-fold in just fifteen years. China now holds 922 billion dollars' worth of U.S. Treasury bills, and a total of almost two trillion in U.S. dollars. Its economy expands nearly 10% a year, while the American economy is hovering on the edge of a full-scale depression, and will need Chinese loans to bail it out. And while the American manufacturing sector gets weaker with each passing day, China has become the workshop of the world. It won't be long before it starts to flex its muscles militarily as well.

Such are the conclusions of a number of distinguished economists and political scientists. What few of them provide, however, is an explanation for this turn of events. A notable exception is a recent book by the Irish journalist Eamonn Fingleton, In the Jaws of the Dragon, which makes the point that while the Americans spend like there is no tomorrow, the top-down bureaucratic system of China forces its citizens to save rather than consume. In this authoritarian, state-capitalist arrangement, a number of policies make consumer spending very difficult, with the resulting savings generating huge cash reserves that are then deployed in boosting key industries. It's a coercive system, says Fingleton, and it works. (In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did something similar during World War II, and the U.S. savings rate went from 5% to 25% in three years. The resulting capital was used to pay for armaments manufacture.)

Yet as Fingleton recognizes, the policy of restricted consumption and enforced savings has a deeper root to it, what he refers to as the "Confucian truth ethic." Although there are real differences among the various schools of Eastern philosophy, they do have a number of important things in common; and as with the Judeo-Christian ethic of the West, these things go very deep. Whether we are talking about the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects, or the Chuang Tzu, two items in particular stand out as central to this way of thinking: the notion that the truth is relative, or provisional; and that harmony is the ultimate end of society. Before I say any more about contemporary China, it might be worth our while to explore these themes in a bit more detail.

In a sense, harmony and radical relativism form the shadow side of the Western tradition, which prizes individualism and the reliability of (binary) logic and empirical evidence. This lends Eastern thought a "forbidden fruit" aspect, an exotic aura that exerted a strong influence on many young people in the U.S. during the sixties and seventies, especially. I remember my own introduction to it during that time, and the sense that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. For Western individualism and scientific reasoning can finally seem oppressive, too tight a box to live in; in which case thought systems such as Taoism and Buddhism appear to be a breath of fresh air. "Go with the flow," we all told each other during those heady days in California.

A particularly significant milestone of the genre during that time was the publication, in 1974, of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was Pirsig's claim that this Eastern shadow tradition showed up in ancient Greece as Sophism, the bête noire of Plato and his school. In fact, so forbidden was this fruit for Pirsig that he finally went insane in the pursuit of the "lost" tradition. Whether or not the Sophists really were Taoists, however, is not the point. What matters historically is that they represented an alternate fork in the road to Platonic doctrine, and one which Plato did his best to squash. The founder of the school, Protagoras (after whom Plato named one of his dialogues), was fond of saying that "man is the measure of all things"; by which he meant that every person has his or her own truth, and that all of these are equally valid. Rhetoric was the issue, he taught his disciples, not logic; persuasion, not reason, was what counted in any given argument. For Plato, this was the philosophy of the mob, of people who were morally and intellectually dead and interested only in acquiring the gift of gab. As Pirsig notes, Plato won the battle-at least in theory-and the Western notion of truth (postmodernism and perhaps law courts excepted) is that it really does exist, and is not merely a function of who is speaking or how persuasive an orator he or she is. As the British philosopher A.N. Whitehead famously remarked, Western philosophy is essentially "a series of footnotes to Plato."

But the East went in a different direction, and for those accustomed to only one way of thinking, it definitely casts a spell. "Choosing is a disease of the mind," as one Eastern text puts it. All is in flux; there is no Yes or No. We must avoid getting attached to Right or Wrong, because they fluctuate depending on the person and the circumstances. "For each individual there is a different 'true' and a different 'false'," says the Chuang Tzu. By following the Tao, going with the flow, one attains the best possible outcome. As the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once put it, the Chinese are "crossing the river by feeling for the stones."

That the truth is contextual, says Fingleton, means that expediency, or the optimization of what is regarded as beneficial, is the true priority. Thus Zhou Enlai, the consummate Chinese politician, was said to have never told the truth-or a lie. In effect, he made no distinction between the two; he just "felt for the stones."

Again, on an individual level, Eastern philosophy can afford a large measure of relief. The Western reality system exalts notions of intentionality and deliberate action; it holds that the world can and should be bent to the human will. But this doesn't really work in human life, does it? We all eventually have to confront the fact that there are many things in life-perhaps the most important ones-that are simply beyond our control. "Those who would take hold of the world and act on it," wrote Lao Tzu, "never, I notice, succeed." Hence the Chinese concept of wu wei, or not-doing; which, properly understood, is not the same thing as passivity. Rather, it refers to surrender, to letting things take their course, follow the Tao.

The word "Tao" appears for the first time in the Analects of Confucius, and means the right way of conduct for both the individual and society. According to the American sinologist Herlee Creel, contemplative Taoism, which operates on the individual level, strives for inner harmony. But there is also, he says, a purposive Taoism, which seeks to use the techniques of nonaction and nonjudgmentalism as a means to power. In other words, be without desire in order to get what you desire. This theme-which is essentially one of pure manipulation-features big in the Tao Te Ching, a book that (like The Prince, by Machiavelli) gives advice to kings and lords, and sees the Tao as a technique of control. "The sage, in governing," says the Tao Te Ching, "empties the people's minds and fills their bellies, weakens their wills and strengthens their bones." We are starting to approach the political philosophy of the Chinese state, in which 97% of the population (a total of 1.3 billion people) have full bellies (no mean achievement, by the way).

This, then, is a system of "soft authoritarianism," in which relationships take precedence over laws-which are, as Fingleton points out, only selectively enforced anyway. Confucianism, he says, is "every enlightened despot's perfect ideology." Its emphasis on harmony is easily twisted into an insistence on conformity. ("The nail that stands out is likely to get hit down," as the Japanese like to say.) It enjoins the people to passivity, and legitimizes authoritarian leadership. Indeed, it is hard to dissent from a system in which there is no right or wrong, true or false, but only that which supposedly promotes the commonweal. Those who try-like the Falun Gong movement that was founded in 1992, and whose doctrines are basically Buddhist-become the target of government crackdown in short order. The Communist Party's monopoly of power is presented to the Chinese people as a "natural" fact of life: the way, the Tao.

Much of Fingleton's concern in his book is over the way in which he sees America becoming "Confucianized," the way U.S. corporations play ball with the Chinese state so as to acquire influence and get on the gravy train. Thus Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft all agreed to abide by China's censorship rules in serving Chinese Internet users-for example, to expunge all references to Tiananmen Square and Taiwanese independence. In addition, top technology firms in the U.S. contracted with China to develop fire walls that block access of Chinese citizens to "dangerous" information, including important Western websites. Under the influence of the China lobby, pro-Chinese journalists and academics in the United States get their reputations enhanced, go to exclusive dinner parties, and receive lavish fees for lectures. Those who are critical are quickly left out of the loop, and barred from sources of research and information. In general, the Chinese system is one of institutionalized bribery, in which corruption functions like legitimate payment for services rendered. The process, says Fingleton, is destroying American values (Enron executives did wind up in jail, after all). It is China that is changing us, he concludes, not we who are changing China. We are not democratizing them-far from it. Rather, they are Confucianizing us.

All this is probably true, but it seems to be part of a larger, graver loss, that of the Enlightenment tradition itself. Eastern philosophy may be the shadow side of that tradition, but it should be clear by now that the shadow has a shadow. How can the West confront a nation whose government is endlessly slippery, and that meets confrontation with Sophism, in effect? And if, as Mao Zedong predicted, "the East wind will prevail over the West," what will it be like to live in a world dominated by an ethos in which the truth doesn't, for all practical purposes, exist, and in which everyone is expected to fall in step with some enforced "harmony"? There is a word for this type of regime: Orwellian. The loss of the Enlightenment yardstick of truth to some kind of pervasive amorality would represent a loss far deeper than an economic one, it seems to me. A Confucianized society in which truth is nothing more than expediency is its own kind of prison; "go with the flow" can become its own form of ego, and of repression.

Some time ago, I was talking with a Mexican colleague of mine, a very brilliant teacher and administrator who had read up on China and was aware of some of these issues. "There may come a time," he said with a sigh, "when we shall actually miss the gringos."

What a thought, eh?

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)-and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a "Notable Book" by the New York Times Book Review.

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The Post, and Delonas, can argue all they want that the dead chimpanzee refers to articles the Post has been running as coverage of the Travis the chimp. However, if that was the case, then why the bubble regarding the stimulus bill? That takes a tasteless "cartoon" and turns it into a political critique. One might even argue that the cartoon promotes assassination as the appropriate response to voice political opposition.

Regardless, the Post is treading on very thin ice with multiple issues.

While I think that Delonas' cartoon is offensive in the extreme, the ultimate responsibility does not lie with him. Rather, it lies with the editors and managers of the New York Post. It is the their responsibility to decide what is (and is not) published. Further, it is their responsibility to determine the context, as well as the content, of what they publish. According to someone reading the Post, the cartoon was placed directly on the facing page of an article (and picture) of President Obama signing the stimulus bill.

Despite attacks on Al Sharpton for bringing national attention to the cartoon, Sharpton was exactly right in doing so.

While it is unlikely that the Post is going to issue an apology (at the very least) for publishing the extremely offensive cartoon, perhaps their advertisers might take a different view. Therefore, here is a partial list of the companies advertising in the New York Post. If you have the time, you might want to contact them with your opinion.
By Rowan Wolf

We all learn that the message depends on what is received and not just what is sent. Our intent does not take away the harm of the message. This is the case with the Delonas cartoon in the 2/18/2009 New York Post. The cartoon depicts to police having just shot dead a chimpanzee (lying in blood on the sidewalk). The bubble reads "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." The article is unabashedly racist - protests to the contrary aside.
Verizon 1-888-591-0875 8AM - 12AM(ET) seven days a week.
Ford
Live Strong
Sprint Gizmodo Comments@gizmodo.com
Jet Blue
Dunkin Donut
Advertising Educational Foundation: Paula Alex CEO pa@aef.com

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What we do see is one nation after another trying to stabilize their own economies - and failing. Hence we get the reports of burgeoning revolutions, and that the global economic crisis has become the top national security threat.

Well of course it is.

Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence reported to Congress on February 12, 2009 on the Annual threat Assessment. In his prepared testimony, he detailed the origin, nature, and scope of the economic crisis. He stated that the crisis originated in the United States, and then started spreading around the world. He stated the fallout of the crisis could have deep and damaging security consequences. He mentions potential loss of both defense and humanitarian cooperation, and the potential for refugees. What he does not mention in open Congress, is the threat we are already seeing - the toppling of governments by their desperate and angry citizens. That "unrest" is clearly not just a problem for "developing" nations.

Central to this globalized world has been the deliberate stripping of nations' ability to sustain themselves. A forced dependence has been created called the import-export economy. Therefore, the natural first (and sane) tendency of nations fighting economic collapse in a collapsing world is to engage in some form of "protectionism." However, the attempt to strengthen national economies by buying national products and giving preference to local and national companies (and workers) are a significant threat on two levels. First, is that people will rapidly discover (particularly in the United States) that they cannot survive on what they produce. Secondly, those developing (read exploited) nations will starve as their exports sit in the docks. If exports are not going out, there is no money to buy the imports now necessary to survival.

So, the "Buy American" provisions get stripped from the stimulus package, rather than engaging in international negotiations which would allow a sane rebuilding of national economies. We don't want the U.S. in a "trade war." Of course we don't, because people in the U.S. have no idea that we cannot even feed our own populace at this point. Further, to allow some degree of protectionism would undermine the globalism already in place. So, nations turn to the IMF and the World Bank to get loans to save their nations. Indeed all is going as it should. As nations have revolted against the injustice of the debts that forced them into this "globalized" economy, the crisis allows the reimplementation of the "yoke of debt."

This issue too becomes a whispered part of the national security aspects of the economic crisis. For like the collapse, the people of the world also know clearly who crafted and enforced globalization, and the hand of the United States is clearly present.

We are clearly seeing that "developed" nations are as vulnerable to unrest and destabilization as the so-called "third world." We have seen mass protests across Europe, and the toppling of Iceland's government by angry pot bangers. I am sure there are concerns about a populist revolt in the United States as well. Further, rising levels of desperation around the world increases the likelihood of revolutionary recruitment. This could certainly threaten "national interests" on a global level, and as Blair notes:

The crisis presents many challenges for the United States. It started in the United States, quickly spread to other industrial economies and then, more recently, to emerging markets. The widely held perception that excesses in US financial markets and inadequate regulation were responsible has increased criticism about free market policies, which may make it difficult to achieve long-time US objectives, such as the opening of national capital markets and increasing domestic demand in Asia. It already has increased questioning of US stewardship of the global economy and the international financial structure.

In other words, the world may "revolt" against hegemonic capitalism. Since the United States has been the "steward" of this transformation into an uncontrolled, profit first and last environment, it is not surprising that global public anger may be directed at the U.S.

All of these points are no-brainers. The U.S. promoted and drove hegemonic capitalism - frequently at the end of a gun. Iraq for example, is a case study in the forced implementation of an unfettered market. The U.S. facilitated what is now called the "Shadow Market" (see video below) that is swallowing every "stimulus' that the nations of the world are throwing at it.

And yet, there is no global effort (at least that is being shared with us) to address the monster under the bed - the global nature of a crisis based on "exotic" and unregulated investment instruments.

Unless we join with the world in either getting a new bucket, or radically "patching" the existing one, national strategies are only going to have limited (if any) success in addressing the economic crisis. This train wreck is still happening. Banks and investment firms are still paying out on the credit default swap "insurance" claims which exceed the entire GDP of the planet. More mortgages in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are resetting to higher interest rates over the next two years - which will continue to drag down recovery at the very least. Job reductions and losses are adding to further mortgage collapse. We have not seen bottom of this crisis, and if something is not done to address the global components, then that "bottom" will indeed be "catastrophic" for much of the population of the planet.

60 Minutes, 10/05/2008, "Wall Street's Shadow Market"

Previous articles by Rowan Wolf on the global nature of the economic collapse.
Economic "Stimulus" Considerations. 1/25/09.

Under Our Noses - The Great Heist of 2008. 1/03/09.

Economic Globalization and Speculation Coming Home to Roost. 10/07/08.

It's the Derivatives Stupid. 9/26/09.

From 'Mortgage Crisis' to 'Economic Meltdown'. 9/19/08.

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In Iceland, Latvia, France, Italy, and elsewhere, people are loudly saying "NO" to spending billions on the corporate gangsters and cutting vital social spending (education, agriculture, health, etc.). For example:

In Greece, December's riots followed a police shooting of a 15-year-old. But what's kept them going, with farmers taking the lead from students, is widespread rage at the government's crisis response: banks got a $36 billion bailout while workers got their pensions cut and farmers received next to nothing. Despite the inconvenience caused by tractors blocking roads, 78 percent of Greeks say the farmers' demands are reasonable. Similarly, in France the recent general strike--triggered in part by President Sarkozy's plans to reduce the number of teachers dramatically--inspired the support of 70 percent of the population.

What is striking to me is the general passivity of the people of the U.S. in the face of a crisis which our nation caused, and which is causing a national economic meltdown putting every worker at risk and many out of their homes. I am not hearing of massive pot pounding crowds in D.C. or any state capitol. Instead, there is virtual public silence while the Republican's block a stimulus package while arguing for the same economic strategies which got us into this mess. It is insane. Where are the calls for recall elections for those arguing for tax cuts?

Both the Congressional Budget Office and Moody's did an analysis of return on stimulus dollar investment. As reported by Reuters, the two most effective programs on return per dollar expended are food stamps ($1.73 for each dollar) and Unemployment Insurance ($1.64 for each dollar). Meanwhile, tax cuts for businesses would cost states "at least $4 billion in state revenue," and "accelerated depreciation of assets" only returns .27 (yes 27 cents) for every dollar.

Yet, there is apparently insufficient public pressure to get legislators off the "negotiation" phase of the stimulus package which is gutting those components that would give significant return, and adding in corporate and high income "stimulus" which costs us. When a stimulus for banks gain us only 27 cents on the dollar, that extra 73 cents is going straight to the coffers of the banks. Not only can we not afford that now, it is part of what has gotten us into this mess.

So when are we going to pick up our pots and raise a ruckus?

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Faith-based groups receiving money from the Bush administration were allowed to discriminate in their hiring by "faith" (religious affiliation) and sexual orientation. As stated in Alexander Mooney's CNN article "Controversy surrounds Obama's faith office:"

In one corner is a string of religion-backed organizations that have accepted federal funds from the 8-year-old program to advance their secular charity work. President Bush issued an executive order in 2002 that allowed these groups to continue their practice of discrimination with respect to hiring. Specifically, many of the organizations carry policies against hiring outside their religion or hiring homosexuals whose lifestyles conflict with church doctorines [sic].

I'm sorry, but this argument is just not acceptable. The faith-based organizations are receiving funding to provide a social service to the public. Such funding should not be used to advance their religious beliefs or organizations. Religion, or "lifestyle," should not be a consideration in their provision of services - nor in those who they hire to provide those services. Further, participation in their religious practices should not be a criteria for receiving the service. This too has been an issue in the past - requiring people to participate in prayer services before they receive assistance.

If an organization is going to discriminate in their hiring for people to provide a service, then what is the reception of those who are seeking services. For example, if they will not hire someone because of they are gay or lesbian, how will gays and lesbians needing their services be served? (Or for that matter, any other issue a faith-based organization might have problems with.)

If one allows one type of organization to discriminate when it receives federal money, why is it not acceptable for every organization receiving funds to discriminate along their ideological interests. To enforce federal requirements on other organizations, and to not enforce them on some is offering special privileges to faith-based organizations. Will the "Neighborhood Partnerships" also be able to vary from federal guidelines on ideological and "lifestyle" grounds?

Obama's Executive Order amended George W. Bush's Executive Order 13199 issued on January 29,2001.

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During those eight long years of neo-conservative Republican lock step, we saw nothing but Republicans and "consensus. Democrats attempting to raise issues, and follow irregularities were silenced. Given the tenor of the Republican party their actions were not surprising. But the media colluded.

Democrats had to hold unapproved "interviews" in the basement of the House. None of the "liberal" media thought that was worth covering. Democratic voices of alarm and resistance just weren't "newsworthy." Press conferences where the "liberal" media either didn't show up, or didn't bother to report.

Now, the Bush administration is history - except for the ongoing train wreck that continues to unfold. But has the "liberal" media changed?

Hardly.

Why do we see wall-to-wall coverage of Republican obstructionism? Why are the Republican talking points the news leader?

Is it because we have a "liberal" media? I sincerely doubt it.

The bull being thrown by the Republicans would be meaningless if the corporate media wasn't turning into a meme for the public.

Now I strongly believe that contrary voices should be heard. However, we are way passed that. The deliberate silencing of contrary voices (democratic, progressive, and just those wanting the truth) during the last eight years, and the current deliberate trumpeting of contrary voices (neo-conservative, Republican lock-step) sends a clear message of where that "liberal" media really stands.

Ironically, Obama provides the credibility for bending over backwards to "include" and "listen to" the Republicans. He meets privately with the intellectual leaders of the neo-conservative movement. He meets with the Republican leadership BEFORE he meets with the Democratic leadership. He gives the nod to including "tax cuts" in the stimulus package that are pork in order to get "bipartisan" buy-in to the stimulus package. Yes, tax credits can be pork - as they were throughout the Bush administration when tax cuts primarily benefited big business and the top 1% of tax payers. The inclusion of similar measures to gather "bipartisan" support are more than a little concession. Regardless, Obama's efforts have increased the "newsworthiness" of the Republican talking points.

I doubt that the corporate media would be less of a trumpet of the neo-con talking points if Obama wasn't taking this approach, but it legitimates the almost autistic focus of the corporate media.

It is time to send the Republicans to the basement for a while, until they realize that "working together" does not mean "their way or no way."

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The ads from the game itself are collected at MySpace. The most directly insulting was for Hulu - a new video tv site.

Hulu.com: Alec Baldwin

The next most offensive is one that I have not found a copy of. It is part of Cargill's "Better Beef" campaign (view print ad). This is to part of its promotion of its acquisition Better Beef Limited of Canada. Cargill also has major beef production acquisitions in Argentina and Australia. That aside, the new ad is remarkable.

The ad talks about stores drawing shoppers to their beef counters, and shows shoppers with carts heading in a focused manner somewhere. After rambling on about the quality of Cargill's beef, it has cowboys herding shoppers - with carts - across an open hillside. Yep, they are actually herding the shoppers - not cattle. The ad seems to say that shoppers (consumers) are cattle.

The hulu ad, Cargill's ad, and many of the others, present consumers as either stupid, or that they can get people to do things that they would not choose to do. All of "you're stupid" ads the convey the implicit or explicit message of power - the power of the product/marketer over the individual - sort of a Svengali effect. I have to wonder how folks view these. Do they think they are cute or funny? Does such advertising work? It must because millions of dollars are invested in the campaign.

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However, the "big" mentality is not only at play in the financial arena. It is systematically at play across the board. Small farmers are eaten up by corporate farms. Small businesses of every sort are eaten up by corporations. Small towns are eaten up by ever-expanding mega-cities.

We see over and over again that the creation of monopolies is a really bad idea. Whether that monopoly is concentrating certain type of production in one nation (i.e. China), capital in a few financial institutions, or food production in corporate agriculture, inevitably disaster lurks.

Remember the old saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"? A wise saying, in my opinion. Anything that happens to that basket risks all the eggs. This is why the President and Vice President don't travel together. Why then have we structured a system that increasingly does just that? Certainly not because it's good for us

An example of the dangers on corporate concentration is yet another food borne disaster with the salmonella contamination of peanut butter products. Involved in the distribution of contaminated product thus far are King Nut and Peanut Corporation of America (PCA). King Nut had $37 million in sales in 2007. PCA had revenue of $17.5 million. The problems at these two companies (at least) have resulted in nation-wide recalls of hundreds of products, and the illness of over 500 people and the deaths of at least eight.

According to a Reuters report, PCA had knowingly shipped contaminated products at least 12 times in 2007 and 2008. Yes, they had product that tested positive for contamination and shipped it anyway. Knowing this makes the reading of press release of 1/13/09 somewhat maddening:

Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), a peanut processing company and maker of peanut butter for bulk distribution to institutions, food service industries, and private label food companies, today announced a voluntary recall of peanut butter produced in its Blakely, Georgia processing facility because it has the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella.

...

"We deeply regret that this has happened," said Stewart Parnell, owner and president of PCA. "Out of an abundance of caution, we are voluntarily withdrawing this product and contacting our customers. We are taking these actions with the safety of our consumers as our first priority."

I am so comforted by their "overabundance of caution" and their "priority" on our safety.

Of course, peanuts and salmonella are not the only health (and recall) issues out there. It is actually a bit frightening to read the FDA's Recalls and Alerts page. At the top of the current list (1/28/09) are recalls from Ther-RX, and ETHEX Corporation. Both have numerous drug recalls.

The Ther-RX recall includes Gynazole-1, Clindesse, microK® Extencaps. Their statement says they are recalling the products "as a precautionary measure because they may have been manufactured under conditions that did not sufficiently comply with current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs)."

The ETHEX recall involves 41 different drugs (many of them common prescriptions), and their reason states : "as a precautionary measure because they may have been manufactured under conditions that did not sufficiently comply with current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs)." [Note: this recall includes part of the nation wide shortage in oxycodone and affiliated drugs.]

One would think that a company would know that they had a problem that impacted product safety - most of the time. While accidents may happen, it seems likely that most issues are known before a product goes out the door. The fact that there are so many recalls does not indicate the safety of our food and drugs, or the efficiency of our monitoring systems. The issuing of "voluntary" recalls does not indicate the honesty and concern of manufacturers.

The FDA does not have the authority to force a company to recall its products. They can make problems public, and request that a company issue a recall. One assumes that companies issue recalls primarily for public relations purposes - not the health and safety of the "consumer." Further, it seems likely that they are willing to let dangerous product out the door - until it becomes public that there is a problem.

At the root of this is that the decisions are being driven by profit - not by any other consideration.

So what does any of this have to do with the coalescing of products under the roofs of fewer and fewer entities?
We have a centralization of products and services with the motivation of those corporations being profit. That profit supersedes health and safety considerations. When these yahoos mess up it affects huge swaths of products - as with the peanut paste salmonella issue - and endangers large portions of the population.

So maybe instead of our seeming fascination with the wonders and powers of "big," we should start repeating "small is beautiful."

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BY MICHAEL PARENTI

Part opportunism, part careerism, part willful denial (or ignorance) of true capitalist and imperial dynamics, and part attachment to the comforts of being within the respectable fold of "permissible" criticism, Left Anticommunism continues to take a huge toll on the American left. In this typically comprehensive and incisive essay, Michael Parenti explores the reasons why the Left anti-communist stance must be seen for what it is: a de facto collaboration with the forces defending the corporate status quo. [This selection is from Parenti's book Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights, 1997). It is reproduced here by courtesy of the author. ]

LEFT ANTICOMMUNISM | [print_link]

By Michael Parenti

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Genuflection to Orthodoxy

Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about "left intellectuals" who try to "rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements" and "then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn't lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We're seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans" (Z Magazine, 10/95).

Chomsky's imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of "communist thugs" who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not "very quickly" switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union's waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin's violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.

Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power's sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.

For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.

Adam Hochschild: Keeping his distance from the "Stalinist Left" and recommending same posture to fellow progressives.

Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they "weaken their credibility" (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in the Cold-War condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters. Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being "smeared" as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.

The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by "communist subversives" or "loyal American liberals." All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.

Even when attacking the Right, the left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that "when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts." While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism "both of the Right and Left," individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a "willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous" (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.

EDITORS' SIDEBAR

GEORGE ORWELL (né Eric Blair). The events and characters in his famous novel, Animal Farm, satirize Stalinism ("Animalism"), authoritarian government and human stupidity, casting all revolutionary projects in a cynical haze of improbability. As could have been expected, bourgeois critics found the book irresistible. It was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005),^[3] and was number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. None of this denies, of course, that Orwell was an extremely gifted writer.

ANTICOMMUNISM'S INTERNATIONAL "PEDIGREE": GEORGE ORWELL AND ARTHUR KOESTLER |||||| American liberals and professional anticommunists can take refuge in the example of distinguished figures such as George Orwell, who, after fighting the Fascists in Spain as an anarcho-sindicalist, turned his talents to invidious attacks on the Soviet Union and the communist vision, in general. A similar apostate is Arthur Koestler, a onetime member of the German Communist Party who promptly shed his allegiance to the revolutionary cause after emigrating to Britain. Koestler, along with Stephen Spender, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, and Richard Wright constituted the sextet behind The God that Failed, a volume packing the testimonies of famous ex-Communists who were writers and journalists. The common theme of the essays was the authors' disillusionment with and abandonment of Communism. The promotional byline to the book was "Six famous men tell how they changed their minds about Communism." The book, a classical work of Anglo-American anti-communist propaganda, was conceived by Richard Crossman, a British Labor politician and self-described 'socialist" who eventually became one of the Labor Party's leading Zionists and anti-communists, and precursor to Tony Blair.--Eds.

ARTHUR KOESTLER The publication in 1940 of ''Darkness at Noon,'' his classic novel about the Moscow trials, brought Koestler a celebrity he had never before enjoyed. It also made him one of the most discussed and despised ex- Communists in the Western world - a figure about whom intellectuals everywhere felt compelled to take a position - for ''Darkness at Noon'' was the work of a writer who had served the Communist Party for eight years in pre-Hitler Germany, in Stalin's Russia and in France and Spain in the 1930's before making his break. Its author thus became something of a leader in the intellectual cold war that accompanied the political cold war of the late 40's and early 50's - a position he attempted to relinquish when he made his farewell to politics in the mid-50's and turned his energies to other causes. In June 1950, Koestler attended and delivered the keynote address at a conference of anti-Communist intellectuals in Berlin that led to the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a CIA-funded front). He was made a Commander in the Order of the British Empire in the 1970s.

Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish--while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa.

Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for "the poor little children who got fed under communism" (his words).

Slinging Labels

Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as "Soviet apologists" and "Stalinists," even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.

Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.

That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin's writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the "Leninist" label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: "Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals." Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power's sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.

At the time of the 1996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: "Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize." U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.

Lenin in his office (1918): much excoriated, seldom read, and rarely understood, the father of the Russian Revolution remains a threatening figure to Western publics. [--Eds]

Lenin constantly dealt with the problem of avoiding the two extremes of liberal bourgeois opportunism and ultra-left adventurism. Yet he himself is repeatedly identified as an ultra-left putschist by mainstream journalists and some on the Left. Whether Lenin's approach to revolution is desirable or even relevant today is a question that warrants critical examination. But a useful evaluation is not likely to come from people who misrepresent his theory and practice.

Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations to be morally unacceptable because of the "crimes of communism." Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic Party in this country, either as voters or members, seemingly unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to inflitrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a "national emergency"; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco's fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the "democratic socialist" anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism

The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party "state capitalism" or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries "socialist" is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world--as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.

First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West, as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess.

The "lavish life" enjoyed by East Germany's party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the "lavish" consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.

Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.

Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.

Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.

All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.

Chile's experiment in free market capitalism at gunpoint under Augusto Pinochet deepened the nation's pronounced ill distribution of income and wealth. Today, even under two successive social democrat regimes, more than 65% of the population lack adequate housing and food, and unemployment is rampant. [--Eds]

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this "pure socialism" view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they "feel betrayed" by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism--not created from one's imagination but developed through actual historical experience--could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the "nature" of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this "nature" come from? Was this "nature" disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of "socialism" and the negative of "bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny" interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.)

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or ad