Kultur Wars of the Psychopaths

A Country of Serfs. Rule by Oligarchs

2010-02-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

For the record: Most Oligarchs ARE PSYCHOPATHS!!!

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02162010.html

Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:58 EST

The media has headlined good economic news: fourth quarter GDP growth of 5.7 percent ("the recession is over"), Jan. retail sales up, productivity up in 4th quarter, the dollar is gaining strength. Is any of it true? What does it mean?

The 5.7 percent growth figure is a guesstimate made in advance of the release of the U.S. trade deficit statistic. It assumed that the U.S. trade deficit would show an improvement. When the trade deficit was released a few days later, it showed a deterioration, knocking the 5.7 percent growth figure down to 4.6 percent. Much of the remaining GDP growth consists of inventory accumulation.

More than a fourth of the reported gain in Jan. retail sales is due to higher gasoline and food prices. Questionable seasonal adjustments account for the rest.

Productivity was up, because labor costs fell 4.4 percent in the fourth quarter, the fourth successive decline. Initial claims for jobless benefits rose. Productivity increases that do not translate into wage gains cannot drive the consumer economy.

Housing is still under pressure, and commercial real estate is about to become a big problem.

The dollar's gains are not due to inherent strengths. The dollar is gaining because government deficits in Greece and other EU countries are causing the dollar carry trade to unwind. America's low interest rates made it profitable for investors and speculators to borrow dollars and use them to buy overseas bonds paying higher interest, such as Greek, Spanish and Portuguese bonds denominated in euros. The deficit troubles in these countries have caused investors and speculators to sell the bonds and convert the euros back into dollars in order to pay off their dollar loans. This unwinding temporarily raises the demand for dollars and boosts the dollar's exchange value.

The problems of the American economy are too great to be reached by traditional policies. Large numbers of middle class American jobs have been moved offshore: manufacturing, industrial and professional service jobs. When the jobs are moved offshore, consumer incomes and U.S. GDP go with them. So many jobs have been moved abroad that there has been no growth in U.S. real incomes in the 21st century, except for the incomes of the super rich who collect multi-million dollar bonuses for moving U.S. jobs offshore.

Without growth in consumer incomes, the economy can go nowhere. Washington policymakers substituted debt growth for income growth. Instead of growing richer, consumers grew more indebted. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan accomplished this with his low interest rate policy, which drove up housing prices, producing home equity that consumers could tap and spend by refinancing their homes.

Unable to maintain their accustomed living standards with income alone, Americans spent their equity in their homes and ran up credit card debts, maxing out credit cards in anticipation that rising asset prices would cover the debts. When the bubble burst, the debts strangled consumer demand, and the economy died.

As I write about the economic hardships created for Americans by Wall Street and corporate greed and by indifferent and bribed political representatives, I get many letters from former middle class families who are being driven into penury. Here is one recently arrived:

"Thank you for your continued truthful commentary on the 'New Economy.' My husband and I could be it's poster children. Nine years ago when we married, we were both working good paying, secure jobs in the semiconductor manufacturing sector. Our combined income topped $100,000 a year. We were living the dream. Then the nightmare began. I lost my job in the great tech bubble of 2003, and decided to leave the labor force to care for our infant son. Fine, we tightened the belt. Then we started getting squeezed. Expenses rose, we downsized, yet my husband's job stagnated. After several years of no pay raises, he finally lost his job a year and a half ago. But he didn't just lose a job, he lost a career. The semiconductor industry is virtually gone here in Arizona. Three months later, my husband, with a technical degree and 20-plus years of solid work experience, received one job offer for an entry level corrections officer. He had to take it, at an almost 40 percent reduction in pay. Bankruptcy followed when our savings were depleted. We lost our house, a car, and any assets we had left. His salary last year, less than $40,000, to support a family of four. A year and a half later, we are still struggling to get by. I can't find a job that would cover the cost of daycare. We are stuck. Every jump in gas and food prices hits us hard. Without help from my family, we wouldn't have made it. So, I could tell you just how that 'New Economy' has worked for us, but I'd really rather not use that kind of language."

Policymakers who are banking on stimulus programs are thinking in terms of an economy that no longer exists. Post-war U.S. recessions and recoveries followed Federal Reserve policy. When the economy heated up and inflation became a problem, the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates and reduce the growth of money and credit. Sales would fall. Inventories would build up. Companies would lay off workers.

Inflation cooled, and unemployment became the problem. Then the Federal Reserve would reverse course. Interest rates would fall, and money and credit would expand. As the jobs were still there, the work force would be called back, and the process would continue.

It is a different situation today. Layoffs result from the jobs being moved offshore and from corporations replacing their domestic work forces with foreigners brought in on H-1B, L-1 and other work visas. The U.S. labor force is being separated from the incomes associated with the goods and services that it consumes. With the rise of offshoring, layoffs are not only due to restrictive monetary policy and inventory buildup. They are also the result of the substitution of cheaper foreign labor for U.S. labor by American corporations. Americans cannot be called back to work to jobs that have been moved abroad. In the New Economy, layoffs can continue despite low interest rates and government stimulus programs.

To the extent that monetary and fiscal policy can stimulate U.S. consumer demand, much of the demand flows to the goods and services that are produced offshore for U.S. markets. China, for example, benefits from the stimulation of U.S. consumer demand. The rise in China's GDP is financed by a rise in the U.S. public debt burden.

Another barrier to the success of stimulus programs is the high debt levels of Americans. The banks are being criticized for a failure to lend, but much of the problem is that there are no consumers to whom to lend. Most Americans already have more debt than they can handle.

Hapless Americans, unrepresented and betrayed, are in store for a greater crisis to come. President Bush's war deficits were financed by America's trade deficit. China, Japan, and OPEC, with whom the U.S. runs trade deficits, used their trade surpluses to purchase U.S. Treasury debt, thus financing the U.S. government budget deficit.

The problem now is that the U.S. budget deficits have suddenly grown immensely from wars, bankster bailouts, jobs stimulus programs, and lower tax revenues as a result of the serious recession. Budget deficits are now three times the size of the trade deficit. Thus, the surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC are insufficient to take the newly issued U.S. government debt off the market.

If the Treasury's bonds can't be sold to investors, pension funds, banks, and foreign governments, the Federal Reserve will have to purchase them by creating new money. When the rest of the world realizes the inflationary implications, the US dollar will lose its reserve currency role. When that happens Americans will experience a large economic shock as their living standards take another big hit.

America is on its way to becoming a country of serfs ruled by oligarchs.

The Conservative War on Democracy: The Puppet Supreme Court

2010-02-02T12:57:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Conservative-War-on-De-by-Bob-Burnett-100129-574.html

January 29, 2010
By Bob Burnett

While the January 21st Supreme Court decision in the case ofCitizens United vs. FECcan be viewed narrowly as granting corporations the right to spend unlimited funds in political contest, the 5-4 ruling is best understood as another victory by conservatives in their decades-long war on democracy.

Many Americans are unaware of this campaign. After all, the US is suffering from a savage recession while fending off attacks from murderous jihadis; meanwhile, a high level of distrust in government has many voters angry and disillusioned. Considering these grim conditions, it's understandable that most Americans remain oblivious of the biggest threat of all: the conservative crusade to turn our democracy into a plutocracy.

In 1971, conservatives responded to a call byLewis F. Powellto reassert themselves by "financing think tanks, reshaping mass media and seeking influence in universities and the judiciary." The result was a well-financed, meticulously planned offensive waged on four fronts.

The primary mode of attack was economic. Conservatives waged no-holds-barred class warfare. Corporation taxes were lowered, as were those of the wealthiest individuals. This increased the gulf between the richest and poorest Americans, ripped apart the social safety net, and decreased social mobility. Working families lost confidence in the future.

A second front was political. Conservatives seized control of the Republican Party and used ideological litmus tests to purge the GOP of moderates. Republican candidates were required to take a "no new taxes" pledge and to subscribe to socially conservative positions.

A third initiative generated a pervasive conservative media presence, featuring conservative personalities and information conduits, such as the Fox News Channel. Millions were spent framing an omnipresent furtive conservative message. This led to familiar general themes - "government is the problem" - and focused responses to conservative hot buttons: estate taxes were branded as "death taxes;" gay marriage was opposed on the grounds that homosexuality was "a disease" that, if encouraged, would infect young people; healthcare reform was opposed because of spurious claims it would result in government control of all health services and "death panels" seeking to euthanize the elderly.

As they pursued their objective of turning the US into a plutocracy, conservatives spread disinformation to deflect blame from their ideas and the Republican lackeys that implemented them. For example, many Americans falsely believe government caused the financial crisis, whereas it was conservative profiteers who brought down the economy.

The fourth aspect of the conservative war on democracy was a protracted campaign to take control of the Federal judiciary. They accomplished this in 2006 with the resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the appointment of Justice Samuel Alito. Since then, a dogmatically conservative majority has controlled the US Supreme Court. As legal writerJeffrey Toobinobserved in his NEW YORKER article on Chief Justice Roberts, "In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts [and his conservative allies] has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff."

TheCitizens United vs. FECdecision strengthens the conservative position that corporations have "personhood" and therefore enjoy the same rights as ordinary individuals, including the right of free speech. In practical terms it means that corporations can spend unlimited funds in political contests. This decision has immediate political consequences, as it permits Republicans to deploy millions of dollars of "independent expenditure"Swift-boatads in the mid-term elections. It also opens the door to foreign corporations spending money to influence USA political campaigns. (It grants corporations more rights than those enjoyed by human beings.)

Since 2001, Americans have repeatedly been warned about an external threat from jihadi terrorists. Unfortunately, during the same period, Progressives haven't done a good job warning Americans about the internal threat from the conservative crusade against democracy. As a consequence, conservatives have been extraordinarily effective: they elected a puppet President, George W. Bush - whose election was confirmed by five conservative Supreme Court justices. They purged the Republican party of all moderates. In 2009, guided by their conservative handlers, Republican Congresspeople waged a successful campaign to block the legislative initiatives of the Obama Administration. In many sections of the country, conservatives dominate the political message via conservative radio shows and the Fox News Channel. Meanwhile, the rich got richer while the assets and income of working families steadily diminished. TheCitizens United vs. FECdecision indicates that conservatives are hell-bent on granting corporations ultimate power in the American political system.

It's time for progressives to wake up to the grave internal threat represented by the conservative jihad. It's time to defend democracy by passing meaningful campaign finance reform, denying the notion that corporations are persons, placing severe restrictions on corporations, and clamping down on the outrageous practices of Fox News Channel and other conservative voices.

It's time for progressives to get their act together, seize control of the message, and take the battle to conservatives. It's time for change we can believe in.

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction

2010-01-30T04:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124/

Democracy in America Is a Useful Fiction
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
Sun, 24 Jan 2010

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d'état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court's ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism."

Inverted totalitarianism represents "the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry," Wolin writes in "Democracy Incorporated." Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

Inverted totalitarianism is not conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. It is furthered by "power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions," Wolin writes. But it is as dangerous as classical forms of totalitarianism. In a system of inverted totalitarianism, as this court ruling illustrates, it is not necessary to rewrite the Constitution, as fascist and communist regimes do. It is enough to exploit legitimate power by means of judicial and legislative interpretation. This exploitation ensures that huge corporate campaign contributions are protected speech under the First Amendment. It ensures that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is interpreted as an application of the people's right to petition the government. The court again ratified the concept that corporations are persons, except in those cases where the "persons" agree to a "settlement." Those within corporations who commit crimes can avoid going to prison by paying large sums of money to the government while, according to this twisted judicial reasoning, not "admitting any wrongdoing." There is a word for this. It is called corruption.

Corporations have 35,000 lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state capitals that dole out corporate money to shape and write legislation. They use their political action committees to solicit employees and shareholders for donations to fund pliable candidates. The financial sector, for example, spent more than $5 billion on political campaigns, influence peddling and lobbying during the past decade, which resulted in sweeping deregulation, the gouging of consumers, our global financial meltdown and the subsequent looting of the U.S. Treasury. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $26 million last year and drug companies such as Pfizer, Amgen and Eli Lilly kicked in tens of millions more to buy off the two parties. These corporations have made sure our so-called health reform bill will force us to buy their predatory and defective products. The oil and gas industry, the coal industry, defense contractors and telecommunications companies have thwarted the drive for sustainable energy and orchestrated the steady erosion of civil liberties. Politicians do corporate bidding and stage hollow acts of political theater to keep the fiction of the democratic state alive.

There is no national institution left that can accurately be described as democratic. Citizens, rather than participate in power, are allowed to have virtual opinions to preordained questions, a kind of participatory fascism as meaningless as voting on "American Idol." Mass emotions are directed toward the raging culture wars. This allows us to take emotional stands on issues that are inconsequential to the power elite.

Our transformation into an empire, as happened in ancient Athens and Rome, has seen the tyranny we practice abroad become the tyranny we practice at home. We, like all empires, have been eviscerated by our own expansionism. We utilize weapons of horrific destructive power, subsidize their development with billions in taxpayer dollars, and are the world's largest arms dealer. And the Constitution, as Wolin notes, is "conscripted to serve as power's apprentice rather than its conscience."

"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things," Wolin writes. "It is politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media's censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.

"It seems a replay of historical experience that the bias displayed by today's media should be aimed consistently at the shredded remains of liberalism," Wolin writes. "Recall that an element common to most 20th century totalitarianism, whether Fascist or Stalinist, was hostility towards the left. In the United States, the left is assumed to consist solely of liberals, occasionally of 'the left wing of the Democratic Party,' never of democrats."

Liberals, socialists, trade unionists, independent journalists and intellectuals, many of whom were once important voices in our society, have been silenced or targeted for elimination within corporate-controlled academia, the media and government. Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and later at Princeton, is arguably the country's foremost political philosopher. And yet his book was virtually ignored. This is also why Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney, along with intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, are not given a part in our national discourse.

The uniformity of opinion is reinforced by the skillfully orchestrated mass emotions of nationalism and patriotism, which paints all dissidents as "soft" or "unpatriotic." The "patriotic" citizen, plagued by fear of job losses and possible terrorist attacks, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and the militarized state. This means no questioning of the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. It means that the military and intelligence agencies are held above government, as if somehow they are not part of government. The most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We, as imperial citizens, are taught to be contemptuous of government bureaucracy, yet we stand like sheep before Homeland Security agents in airports and are mute when Congress permits our private correspondence and conversations to be monitored and archived. We endure more state control than at any time in American history.

The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig. His latest book is "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle."

The Obama Brand: Feel Good While Overlords Loot the Treasury and Launch Imperial Wars

2010-01-28T14:57:00.000-08:00

By Chris Hedges, Nation Books
Posted on January 25, 2010, Printed on January 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145358/

Editor's Note: The following is an adapted excerpt from Chris Hedges' book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009) that first appeared in Tikkun magazine.

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, this product is duping us into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to re-inflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next fifteen to twenty years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, increasing the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan, which have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws and restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. This strategy gave their products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers confound a brand with an experience.

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core, and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR 676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.

Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads, and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel.

Celebrity culture has leached into every aspect of our culture, including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes -- "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." Junk politics redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed "character." The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called "personality." The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity, and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination, and likeability. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self."

The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state. These corporations, once they have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will leave tens of millions of Americans bereft, bewildered, and yearning for even more potent and deadly illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out what is left of our diminished open society.

Empire of Illusion

Obama is a product of a deeper cultural reality that I describe in some detail in my book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

In the contemporary world, celebrity worship increasingly encroaches on reality. And this adulation is pervasive.

The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of women to Oprah Winfrey, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and The Purpose Driven Life won't make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated.

"What does the contemporary self want?" asked critic William Deresiewicz, adding:

The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge -- broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider -- the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves -- by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers -- Neal Gabler calls them "essentially drama coaches" -- to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movies of our own lives. Martha Stewart built her financial empire, when she wasn't insider trading, telling women how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look and how we present ourselves to others. There are glossy magazines such as Town & Country that cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.

The Swan was a Fox reality makeover show. The title of the series referred to Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Ugly Duckling," in which a bird thought to be homely grew up to be a swan. "Unattractive" women were chosen to undergo three months of extensive plastic surgery, physical training, and therapy for a "complete life transformation." Each episode featured two "ugly ducklings" who competed with each other to go on to the Swan beauty pageant. "I am going to be a new person," said one contestant in the opening credits.

In one episode, twenty-seven-year-old Cristina, an Ecuador-born office administrator from Rancho Cordova, California, was chosen to be on the program.

"It's not just the outside I want to change, but it's the inside, too," Cristina told the camera mournfully. She had long black hair and light brown skin. She wore a baggy gray sweatshirt and no makeup. Her hair was pulled back. We discovered that she was devastatingly insecure about being intimate with her husband because of her post-pregnancy stretch marks. The couple considered divorce.

"I just want to be, not a completely different person, but I want to be a better Cristina," she said.

As a "dream team" of plastic surgeons discussed the necessary corrections, viewers saw a still image of Cristina, in a gray cotton bra and underwear, superimposed on a glowing blue grid. Her small, drooping breasts, wrinkled stomach, and fleshy thighs were apparent. A schematic figure of an idealized female form revolved at the left of the screen. Crosshairs targeted and zoomed in on each flawed area of Cristina's face and body. The surgical procedures she would undergo were typed out beside each body part. Brow lift, eye lift, nose job, liposuction of chin and cheeks, dermatologist visits, collagen injections, LASIK eye surgery, tummy tuck, breast augmentation, liposuction of thighs, dental bleaching, full dental veneers, gum tissue recontouring, a 1,200-calorie daily diet, 120 hours in the gym, weekly therapy, and coaching. The effect was suggestive of a military operation. The image of a blueprint and crosshairs was used repeatedly throughout the program.

Cristina was shown writing in her diary: "I want a divorce because I think that my husband can do better without me. And it would be best for us to go in different directions. I am not happy with myself at all, so I think, why make this guy unhappy for the rest of his life?"

At the end of the three months, Cristina and her opponent, Kristy, were finally allowed to look in a mirror for "the final reveal." They were brought separately to what looked like a marble hotel foyer. Curving twin staircases with ornate iron banisters framed the action. A crystal chandelier glittered at the top of the stairs. Sconces and oil paintings in gold frames hung on the cream-colored walls.

The "dream team" was assembled in the marble lobby. Massive peach curtains obscured one wall.

"I think Cristina has really grown into herself as a woman, and she's ready to go back home and start her marriage all over again," said the team therapist.

Two men in tuxedos opened a set of tall double doors. Cristina entered in a tight black evening gown and long black gloves. She was meticulously made up, and her hair had been carefully styled with extensions. The "dream team" burst into applause and whoops.

"I've been waiting twenty-seven years for this day," Cristina told host Amanda Byram tearfully. "I came for a dream, the American dream, like all the Latinas do, and I got it!"

"You got it!" cheered Byram. "Yes, you did!"

Reverberating drumbeats sounded. "Behind that curtain," says Byram, "is a mirror. We will draw back the curtain, the mirror will be revealed, and you will see yourself for the first time in three months. Cristina, step up to the curtain."

Short, suspenseful cello strokes were heard. There was a tumbling drumroll.

"I'm ready," quavered Cristina.

The curtain parted slowly in the middle. An elaborate full-length mirror reflected Cristina. The cello strokes billowed into the Swan theme song.

"Oh, my God!" she gasped, covering her face. She doubled over. Her knees buckled. She almost hit the floor. "I am so beautiful!" she sobbed. "Thank you, oh, thank you so much! Thank you, God! Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this! Look at my arms, my figure ... I love the dress! Thank you, oh! I'm in love with myself!"

The "dream team" burst into applause again. "Well, you owe this to yourself," said Byram. "But you also owe it to these fantastic experts. Guys, come on in."

The crowd of smiling experts closed in on their creation, clapping as they approached.

At the end of each episode, the two contestants were called before Byram to hear who would advance to the pageant. The winner often wept and was hugged by the loser. Byram then pulled the loser aside for "one final surprise." The double doors opened once more, and her family was invited onto the set for a joyful reunion. In celebrity culture, family is the consolation prize for not making it to the pageant.

The Swan's transparent message is that once these women have been surgically "corrected" to resemble mainstream celebrity beauty as closely as possible, their problems will be solved. "This is a positive show where we want to see how these women can make their dreams come true once they have what they want," said Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of FremantleMedia North America, producer of The Swan. Troubled marriages, abusive relationships, unemployment, crushing self-esteem problems -- all will vanish along with the excess fat off their thighs. They will be new. They will be flawless. They will be celebrities.

In the Middle Ages, writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens. People knelt before God and the church in the Middle Ages. We flock hungrily to the glamorous crumbs that fall to us from glossy magazines, talk and entertainment shows, and reality television. We fashion our lives as closely to these lives of gratuitous consumption as we can. Only a life with status, valued physical attributes, and affluence is worth pursuing.

Hedonism and wealth are openly worshipped on shows such as The Hills, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, My Super Sweet 16, and The Real Housewives of ... series. The American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, are the characters we envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres, flaunting their surgically enhanced, perfect bodies in haute couture. Their teenagers throw $200,000 parties and have million-dollar weddings. This life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying.

The working classes, composed of tens of millions of struggling Americans, are shut out of television's gated community. They have become largely invisible. They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume countless lies daily, false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved, and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling, and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages us all to think of ourselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. It is, as Christopher Lasch diagnosed, a culture of narcissism. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors -- along with the array of self-help bestsellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists, and business tycoons -- all peddle a fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, and those who grasp the hollowness of celebrity culture, are shunned and condemned for their pessimism. The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation, and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled, and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, and by visualizing what we want, can achieve (and deserve to achieve) happiness, fame, and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything.

American Idol, a talent-search reality show that airs on Fox, is one of the most popular shows on American television. The show travels to different American cities in a "countrywide search" for the contestants who will continue to the final competition in Hollywood. The producers of the show introduced a new focus, in the 2008-2009 season, on the personal stories of the contestants.

During the Utah auditions, we meet Megan Corkrey, age twenty-three, the single mother of a toddler. She has long, dirty-blond hair and a wholesome, pretty face. A tattoo sleeve covers her right arm from the shoulder to below the elbow. She wears a black, grey, and white dress reminiscent of the 1950s, and ballet flats. She is a font designer.

In an interview Corkrey says, "I am a mother. He will be two in December." We see Corkrey with a little blond boy, reading a book together on a beanbag chair. Breezy guitar music plays. "His name is Ryder." We see Corkrey kissing Ryder and putting him to bed. "I recently decided to get a divorce, which is new." The guitar music turns pensive. "The life I had planned for us, the life I'd pictured, wasn't going to happen. I cried a lot for a while. I don't think I stopped crying. And Ryder, of course, you can be crying, and then he walks by, and does something ridiculous, and you can't help but smile and laugh." We see Corkrey laughing with her son on the floor. "And a little piece kind of heals up a little bit."

The montage of Corkrey's life fills the screen as the rock ballad swells. "I can laugh at myself, while the tears roll down ..." sings the band. We see Corkrey and her son looking out a window. She holds her son up to a basketball hoop as he clutches a blue ball.

"It was kind of crazy, I found out Idol was coming to Salt Lake, and I'd just decided on the divorce, and for the first time in my life it was a crossroads where ANYTHING can happen! So why not go for what I love to do?"

Corkrey enters the audition room. The judges -- Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi -- are seated behind a long table in front of a window. They all have large red tumblers with "Coca-Cola" printed on them. They seem charmed by her exuberant presence. She sings "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" from Show Boat. Her performance is charismatic and quirky. She improvises freely and assuredly with the rhythms and notes of the song, beaming the whole time.

"I really like you," says Abdul. "I'm bordering on loving you. I think I'm loving you. Yeah, I do. Simon?"

"One of my favorite auditions," Cowell says in a monotone.

"Yes!" grins Corkrey.

"Because you're different," continues Cowell, sternly. "You are one of the few I'm going to remember. I like you, I like your voice, I mean, seriously good voice. I loved it."

"You're an interesting girl. You have a glow about you, you have an incredible face," says DioGuardi.

The judges vote.

"Absolutely yes," says Cowell.

"Love you," says Abdul.

"Yes!" says DioGuardi.

"One hundred percent maybe," smiles Jackson.

"You're goin' to Hollywood!" cheers DioGuardi as the inspirational rock music swells.

"YES! Thank you, guys!" Corkrey screams with delight. She runs out of the audition room into a crowd of her cheering friends. The music plays as she dances down the street waving her large yellow ticket, the symbol of her success.

Celebrities, who often come from humble backgrounds, are held up as proof that anyone, even we, can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are living proof that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success, and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our "insignificant" individual achievements, however, eventually leads to frustration, anger, insecurity, and invalidation. This juxtaposition results, ironically, in a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. We beg for more. We ingest these lies until our money runs out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game were our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

Human beings become a commodity in a celebrity culture. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. Those who fail to meet the ideal are belittled and mocked. Friends and allies are to be used and betrayed during the climb to fame, power, and wealth. And when they are no longer useful they are to be discarded. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency, and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, voted off a reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to "disappear" the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America's Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, non-persons. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition. Life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with others are forms of weakness. And those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve to lose. Those who are denigrated and ridiculed on reality television, often as they sob in front of the camera, are branded as failures. They are responsible for their rejection. They are deficient.

In an episode from the second season of the CBS reality game show Survivor, cast members talk about exceptional friendships they have made within their "tribe," or team. Maralyn, also known as Mad Dog, is a fifty-two-year-old retired police officer with a silver crew cut and a tall, masculine build. She is sunning herself in a shallow stream, singing "On the Street Where You Live." Tina, a personal nurse and mother, walks up the stream toward her.

"Sing it, girl! I just followed your voice."

"Is it that loud?"

"Maralyn, she's kind of like our little songbird, and our little cheerleader in our camp," Tina says in an interview. "Maralyn and I have bonded, more so than I have with any of the other people. It might be our ages, it might just be that we kind of took up for one another."

We see Tina and Maralyn swimming and laughing together in the river.

"Tina is a fabulous woman," says Maralyn in an interview. "She is a star. I trust Tina the most."

Maralyn and Tina's tribe, Ogakor, loses an obstacle course challenge, in which all the tribe members are tethered together. If one person falls, the entire team is slowed. Mad Dog Maralyn falls several times and is hauled back to her feet by Colby, the "cowboy" from Texas.

Because they lost, the members of Ogakor must vote off one of their tribe members. The camera shows small groups of twos and threes in huddled, intense discussion.

"The mood in the camp is a very sad mood, but it's also a very strategic mood," says Tina. "Everyone's thinking, ‘Who's thinking what?'"

The vote is taken at dusk, in the "tribal council" area. It resembles a set from Disney World's Adventureland. A ring of tall stone monoliths is stenciled with petroglyphs. Torches flicker above. A campfire blazes in the center of the ring. Primitive drums and flutes accompany the scene.

The Ogakor team arrives at dusk, each holding a torch. They sit before Survivor's host, Jeff Probst.

"So I just want to talk about a couple of big topics," says Probst, who wears a safari outfit. "Trust. Colby, is there anyone here that you don't trust, wouldn't trust?"

"Sure," says Colby.

"Tell me about that."

"Well, I think that's part of the game," says Colby. "It's way too early to tell exactly who you can trust, I think."

"What about you, Mitchell? Would you trust everyone here for forty-two days?" asks Probst. "I think the motto is, ‘Trust no one,' " answers Mitchell. "I have a lot of faith in a good number of these people, but I couldn't give 100 percent of my trust."

"What about you, Mad Dog?" asks Probst. "These all your buddies?"

Maralyn looks around at her team members. "Yes," she says unequivocally. "Yes. And, Jeff, I trust with my heart."

"I think friendship does enter into it at some point," says Jerri. "But I think it's very important to keep that separate from the game. It's two totally different things. And that's where it gets tricky." Jerri will say later, as she casts her vote, "This is probably one of the most difficult things for me to do right now. It's purely strategic, it's nothing personal. I am going to miss you dearly."

"Jeff," Maralyn breaks in. "I'm conjoined with Tina. She is a constellation. And, the cowboy [Colby]! The poor cowboy has dragged me around so many times [during the obstacle course challenge]. I appreciate it."

"I'd do it again," laughs Colby broadly.

"Hey, you hear that? He'd do it again!" says Maralyn.

It is time to vote. Each team member walks up a narrow bridge lit by flaring torches, again looking like something out of Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room, made of twisted logs lashed with vines, to a stone table. They write the name of the person they want to eliminate and put it in a cask with aboriginal carvings. Most of the votes are kept anonymous, the camera panning away as each person writes. But as Tina, Mad Dog Maralyn's best friend and "constellation," casts her vote, she shows us her ballot: Mad Dog. "Mad Dog, I love you," she says to the camera, "I value your friendship more than anything. This vote has everything to do with a promise I made, it has nothing to do with you. I hope you'll understand." She folds her vote and puts it in the cask.

"Once the vote is tallied, the decision is final, and the person will be asked to leave the tribal council area immediately," says Probst.

Five people of the seven voted to eliminate Maralyn.

"You need to bring me a torch, Mad Dog," says Probst. She does so, first taking off her green baseball cap and putting it affectionately on Amber, who sits next to her and gives her a hug. The camera shows Tina looking impassive.

"Mad Dog," says Probst, holding the flaming torch Maralyn has brought him, "the tribe has spoken." He takes a large stone snuffer and extinguishes the torch. The camera shows Maralyn's rueful face behind the smoking, blackened torch. "It's time for you to go," says Probst. She leaves without speaking or looking at anyone, although there are a few weak ‘byes from the tribe.

Before the final credits, we are shown who, besides her friend Tina, voted to eliminate Maralyn. They are Amber, who gave Maralyn a farewell hug, along with Mitchell, Jerri, and Colby, Maralyn's "cowboy."

Celebrity culture plunges us into this moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to "succeed." The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us that existence is to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the highest good. "I simply agreed to go along with [Jerri and Amber] because I thought it would get me down the road a little better," says young, good-looking Colby in another episode of Survivor. "I wanna win. And I don't want to talk to anybody else about loyalties -- don't give me that crap. I haven't trusted anyone since day one, and anyone playing smart should have been the same way."

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation; and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation's economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. In his masterful essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin wrote, "The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,' the phony spell of a commodity."

According to C. Wright Mills, "The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition." Mills added:

In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains access to the President of the United States. It is carried to the point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military. It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated. Then, a second feature of the star system begins to work: all the stars of any other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn toward the new star and he toward them. The success, the champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely with other champions to populate the world of the celebrity.

Degradation as entertainment is the squalid underside to the glamour of celebrity culture. "If only that were me," we sigh, as we gaze at the wealthy, glimmering stars on the red carpet. But we are as transfixed by the inverse of celebrity culture, by the spectacle of humiliation and debasement that characterizes tabloid television shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and The Howard Stern Show. We secretly exult, "At least that's not me." It is the glee of cruelty with impunity, the same impulse that drove crowds to the Roman Colosseum, to the pillory and the stocks, to public hangings, and to traveling freak shows.

Celebrity is the vehicle used by a corporate society to sell us these branded commodities, most of which we do not need. Celebrities humanize commercial commodities. They present the familiar and comforting face of the corporate state. Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, on an episode of America's Next Top Model, gushes to a group of aspiring young models, "Our job as models is to sell." But they peddle a fake intimacy and a fantasy. The commercial "personalizing" of the world involves oversimplification, distraction, and gross distortion. "We sink further into a dream of an unconsciously intimate world in which not only may a cat look at a king but a king is really a cat underneath, and all the great power-figures Honest Joes at heart," Richard Hoggart warned in The Uses of Literacy. We do not learn more about Barack Obama by knowing what dog he has bought for his daughters or if he still smokes. This personalized trivia, passed off as news, diverts us from reality.

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojeck calls celebrity culture "the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture." He goes further:

Capitalism originally sought to police play and pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the central life interest threatened the economic survival of the system. The family, the state, and religion engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation to control desire and ensure compliance with the system of production. However, as capitalism developed, consumer culture and leisure time expanded. The principles that operated to repress the individual in the workplace and the home were extended to the shopping mall and recreational activity. The entertainment industry and consumer culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation.' Through this process individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded version of humanity.

This cult of distraction, as Rojeck points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Before the meltdown, consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be -- until reality hit us like a tsunami -- shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations that have disempowered, used, and now discarded them.

This article was in part adapted from Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).

Rule By The Rich

2010-01-28T13:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/100125_rich.htm

Rule By The Rich
Paul Craig Roberts
VDare
Mon, 25 Jan 2010

The election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate by Democratic voters in Massachusetts sends President Obama a message. Voters perceive that Obama's administration has morphed into a Bush-Cheney government. Obama has reneged on every promise he made, from ending wars, to closing Gitmo, to providing health care for Americans, to curtailing the domestic police state, to putting the interests of dispossessed Americans ahead of the interests of the rich banksters who robbed Americans of their homes and pensions.

But what can Obama do other then spout more rhetoric?

The Democrats were destroyed as an independent party by jobs offshoring and so-called free trade agreements such as NAFTA. The effect of "globalism" has been to destroy the industrial and manufacturing unions, thus leaving the Democrats without a power base and source of funding.

Obama and the Democrats cannot be an opposition party, because Democrats are as dependent as Republicans on corporate interest groups for campaign funding.

The Democrats have to support war and the police state if they want funding from the military/security complex. They have to make the health care bill into a subsidy for private insurance if they want funding from the insurance companies. They have to abandon the American people for the rich banksters if they want funding from the financial lobby.

Now that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court have overturned decades of U.S. law and given corporations the ability to buy every American election, Democrats and Republicans can be nothing but pawns for a plutocracy.

Most Americans are hard pressed, but the corporations have only begun to milk them.

Wars are too profitable for the armaments industry to ever end. High unemployment is now a permanent state in the U.S., thus coercing job seekers into military service.

The security industry profits from the police state and regards civil liberties as a hindrance to profits. By announcing that he intends to continue the Bush policy of indefinite detention, a violation of the Constitution and U.S. legal procedures, Obama has granted the Democratic Party's consent to the Republicans' destruction of habeas corpus, the main bastion of individual liberty.

Jobs offshoring is too profitable for U.S. corporations for Obama to be able to save American jobs and restart the broken economy.

Americans are being squeezed out of health care not only by the loss of job benefits, but also by corporate takeover of medical practice from physicians. Today medical doctors are wage slaves of corporate health providers that leverage doctors by turning them into supervisors of physician assistants, lower-paid people without medical degrees who perform the services that doctors once provided. As neither doctor nor physician assistant has any independence, there is no one to represent the patient's care against the profits of the corporation.

Even environmental concerns are being used to create "cap and trade" rights to buy and sell the ability to pollute. Wall Street is licking its lips over a new source of leveraged derivative instruments.

The American public cannot even get reliable information about their plight as the "MainStream Media" has been concentrated into a few corporate hands that do not permit independent reporting. The media is as dependent on corporate money as are politicians.

How can President Obama restart an economy that has been moved offshore? Millions of manufacturing jobs are gone, as are millions of jobs for college graduates, such as software engineering, Information Technology--indeed, any intellectual skill the product of which can be conveyed via the Internet. Even those intellectual skill jobs that do remain in the U.S. are filled increasingly by foreigners brought in on work visas.

The wipeout of blue collar and middle class job growth has stopped the growth of American incomes except, of course, those of the super rich. For a decade American consumers substituted increased personal indebtedness for income growth. In order to maintain and to increase their consumption, Americans consumed their assets, such as their home equity. Americans reached their maximum debt load just as the real estate bubble burst and just as the banksters highly-leveraged, toxic financial instruments brought down the stock market and the values of Americans' pensions.

The enormous damage done to the U.S. economy by jobs offshoring, work visas, and financial deregulation cannot be offset by government stimulus plans, which expand the debt burdens that are crushing Americans. The federal government's massive budget deficits and the Federal Reserve's easy monetary policy are setting the stage for an inflationary depression to follow a deflationary depression.

The Federal Reserve chairman says not to worry about inflation, because the Fed can take the money back out of the economy. But can the Fed take the money out without contracting the economy?

The Federal Reserve says not to worry about financing the federal budget deficit. Banksters are buying the Treasury bonds with the proceeds from their sales of their toxic derivatives to the Fed.

So what is happening to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet? And when will the Fed have no recourse but to print new money in order to finance the federal deficit?

How long can the dollar retain its reserve currency role in such circumstances, and how does the U.S. pay for its imports when this role is lost?

Don't look to Washington for answers to these questions.

Are we in a ‘culture war’?

2010-01-27T16:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/6472/

Sheila Liaugminas | Monday, 25 January 2010
Are we in a ‘culture war’?

I’m on a brief trip, and grabbed two books to bring with. Tough task, given the depth and breadth of my backup reading list and the library already spilling over to piles on the office floor….

So I’m looking at Dr. Peter Kreeft’s How To Win the Culture War for the first time in the past one to two years, seeing what I highlighted last time (geesh….the luxury of reading a book straight through within a few days, start to finish, without losing train of thought).

It struck me that right up front, one of the things he mentioned is that our Constitution guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness….and being Kreeft, of course he prodded our consciences on what what means.

From the book:

“One-third of all American children are killed - by their mothers, before they can be born, using healers as hit men.

“This is a happy country? This is peace?

“I know of a doctor who spent two years in the Congo winning the confidence of a dying tribe who would not trust outsiders (black or white) and who were dying because of their bad diet. He was a dietitian, and he saved their lives. Once they knew this, they trusted him totally and asked him all sorts of questions about life in the West. They believed all the amaizng things he told them, like flying to the moon and destroying whole cites with one bomb, but there were two things they literally could not believe.

“One was that in the West there are atheists - people who believe in no gods at all. (”Are these people blind and deaf? Have they never seen a leaf or heard a waterfall?”) The other was that in one nation alone (America), over a million mothers each year pay doctors to kill their babies before they are born. Their reaction to this was to giggle, which was their embarrassed way of trying to be polite, assuming it was a joke. They simply had no holding place in their minds for this concept, and they expected every day that the doctor would tell them the point of the joke.

“And it is we who call these people ‘primitive.’ The irony is mountainous.

“Mother Teresa said, simply (everything she said, she said simply,), ‘When a mother can kill her baby, what is left of civilization to save.?” Chuck Colson has said that a ‘new Dark Ages’ is looming.”

We were warned, notes Kreeft.

Just a partial list: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age. Spengler, 85 years ago, in The Decline of the West. Chesterton, who wrote 75 years ago that ‘the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially sexual morality…The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but in Manhattan.’ Huxley, 65 years ago, in Brave New World…

Speaking of which…..The Manhattan Declaration is the frontline in the current culture war.

In-Depth Exclusive: Diary of a Madman - Rare Mengele Memoir Unearthed by Auctioneer

2010-01-20T14:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Diary-of-a-Madman--Rare-M-by-Gustav-Wynn-100120-322.html

January 20, 2010
In-Depth Exclusive: Diary of a Madman - Rare Mengele Memoir Unearthed by Auctioneer
By Gustav Wynn

This Thursday, an auctioneer of historical documents is offering an extremely rare diary written by the fugitive Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The auction tomorrow also features a revealing letter written by Mengele during his Auschwitz tenure, but the diary presents a rich, detailed look into Mengele's mind. According to the auctioneer, it originated from a source close to the family.

I was able to inspect the diary Monday, ironically written into a small children's composition book with "Zoological Workbork" printed onto one of the pages within. The doctor covered every one of the book's blank pages with vignettes of the past and present day, interspersing his thoughts on everything from art, literature, religion, modernity, German history andwomen's rights to predictions for the future of mankind, clearly showing a preoccupation with eugenics, natural selection and the recurring concept of loyalty.

The catalog description offered from the site of auctioneer Alexander Autographs is here, yet shows only a few pictures of diary pages and a limited representative sampling of the writing. Written in German, the memoir begins in May, 1960 when Mengele was 49, but later entries do not include dates. Aside from the first page written in pencil, the balance is written in blue ink in his distinctive script, including footnotes, corrections and annotations throughout.

The content is remarkable, particularly because it shows blow-by-blow the thought processes of the man known as "The Angel of Death" who sent tens of thousands to their death in Auschwitz, conducted bizarre experiments on live human subjects and ultimately escaped trial and execution by hiding out using a series of aliases.

Given exclusive in-depth access, it was clear to me Mengele remained committed to his belief that humans should be bred for superior genetic characteristics and the inferior should be euthanized or prevented from reproducing, but his content segues from the mundane to the philosophical to the autobiographical to the historical in a visible stream of consciousness that makes quite transparent his internal connections. Presented here are only short excepts from the the 180 pages of handwritten entries.

Marking his first year anniversary in his new home, Mengele decides "I see how right my plans have been all along and I understand now that following people's advice mostly results in irreparable nonsense. But I refuse to pass guilt onto others: "I was solely responsible for my decisions." He proclaims himself in "good spirits" offering a review of the then-popular book Dr. Zhivago, he considers the characters and their ideas of truth and beauty, launching into a polemic on natural selection: "There's only one truth and one true beauty....There's no 'good' or 'bad' in nature. There's only 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate.' However 'appropriate' things are not necessarily beautiful. Both sides receive equal chances. Nevertheless, nature provides a strainer. Things which are 'inappropriate' fall through since they do not succeed in the struggle for survival."

Continuing on natural selection, in part: "...human beings have a sense of absolute beauty even though it seems to be subjective at first. (Experiments by Lenz!)...I believe that all human beings share the same ideal of beauty. There are no racial differences to be found....the artistic endeavor is a struggle to create the best representation of the human body...absolute beauty seems to me a prerequisite for all human beings. This is how absolute beauty becomes the superior notion that unites all mankind. Let's go one step further and impose the idea of beauty on the animal world....ideal beauty for a certain species transcends racial boundaries."

Mengele compares horses bred for polo versus horses bred for pulling trucks, noting the "noble horse" has been intentionally bred by humans. In part: "whenever we observe horses critically, we almost start to believe that they recognize the quality of their own beauty...this is a beautiful area for studying animal psychology."

Then, Mengele seems to pivot to his work with humans in self-described "deep thoughts": "We started with the idea of beauty, and we condensed this common notion more and more the further we went. We achieved this point by contrasting the notions of 'beautiful' and 'good'...you cannot find anything 'good' in the realm of biology. Now, I would like to look at humanity through religious eyes and under the assumption that human beings have an immortal soul. This is the notion of 'goodness' in a typical human idea. It's a ploy to separate mankind from his or her biological existence...Think about loyalty! It's a result of breeding, as for example in dogs, man's oldest companion. But you cannot breed qualities that weren't there all along!"

In the South American jungle, Mengele observes bird and other animal behaviors and monkeys in particular, writing about the first time he saw a monkey in the wild. Contrasting his experiments on primates in the lab, "I've taken many monkey carcasses out of the formol and prepared muscles and parts of the pancreas. I was familiar with the bone structures of different monkey races as a part of my studies in comparative anatomy." In another entry, he describes encounters with wild ostriches, noting how herd-like, observant and skittish they are. "They certainly don't bury their head in the sand....I assume, people find the ostrich's anatomy ideal for such behavior and simply invented this biological trait. If only the ostrich knew!"

Mengele observes the pristine state of the "virgin jungle" and the idea of "Paradise Lost" as settlers changed the landscape: "Nothing has changed for thousands of years. Like in a vision, you can see how there used to be an ocean right here, and you can feel how the waters slowly retreated and turned into gigantic rivers that still flow today...Finally, human beings arrived."

Mengele points out that cultures didn't flourish in this dense, lush Eden, however, preferring higher grounds. "The European colonial forces were the first to exploit the vast regions that still seem sleepy and ancient today. This is still the greatest accomplishment of the Spaniards and the Jesuits...The ranches are being drained through huge canals....the forest will be cultivated, and expressways will go everywhere. Maybe modern man will turn some of the areas into sanctuaries so that people can observe the many forms of nature from their cars."

In observing local villagers collecting wood for a bonfire commemorating St. John, Mengele enjoins a treatise on holiday rituals and recalls his experiences as an organizer for a German youth movement back in high school in order to give "insight into a certain stage of my personal development", beginning "...most people didn't know the deeper meaning of celebrating solstice. The youth movement restored the original meaning of solstice, which the Christian church had changed to it's own advantage.

It makes no sense to honor a saint (John) through bonfires. It's simply the Christian reinterpretation of a heathen rite to celebrate the beginning of summer. There are many other examples like this one; the most famous is Christmas which was nothing more than the celebration of winter solstice. Nordic people started celebrating Christmas, as it is done today."

Mengele describes the worldwide spread of these Germanic rites into "...a procession of Christian festivities. They hoped that the origins would slowly fall into oblivion. In Germany, this trend was stopped for at least a while, thanks to the youth movement and religious re-awakening." On Candlemas, he tells of priests telling their parish "the light is Maria's present" to obscure that "...one more hour of sunlight was quite important for traditional Germanic agriculture. This is the main reason the day of light was celebrated."

Noting the impact of his generation, "Our Germanic religion was directly connected to nature in which human beings feel logically at home. The youth movement never intended to reject or doubt Christian beliefs or religious institutions....We had to remember our inner strength, and this was of utmost importance after World War I and the shameful peace that followed....We had to find the deepest sources of German strength to make our restoration possible. We could not expect other people to help us, and we couldn't rely on religion. For example, what has the Catholic Church done to amend or get rid of the Treaty of Versailles?"

"The youth movement laid the spiritual foundation for the national uprising that was to follow World War I. Later on, the youth movement became part of the great political organization, the Hitlerjugend."

Galvanizing many under a common banner "who all had the same goal", Mengele notes the movement to re-purify German culture included groups interested in sports, military training, folk music, dance, travel and theater. "We had to learn German fairy tales and study the notions of a Germanic afterlife. We had to liberate Germanic history from Roman and Catholic influences", emphasizing German authors and composers to embrace "an idealistic, heroic way of life....We were ready for another attempt to change the empire's shameful history. In the end, this heroic way of life prevailed, and ten years later all of Germany embraced it....During the years 1927, 1928, 1929 and 1930, I was the head of our local B.D.J. chapter and it was my responsibility to organize the solstice events."

Mengele then describes his tenure in June of 1928 as leader of a local youth group consisting of 60 boys and 30 girls. "The girls did their stuff by themselves and therefore they created no work for me....the girls were either older than I was, or they were my age. The girls' leader was quite older; she was 5 years my senior. We had very little contact....the age difference made romance impossible; on the other hand, relationships between boys and girls were proper, relaxed and caring."

Describing the solstice event he was charged with organizing, Mengele recalled precisely the program itinerary and selections sung, being "Flames Rise" and "No Country More Beautiful", followed by a march home. Praising the rally's effectiveness, he notes : "...it left it's impression on the population. Jumping over the fire had made our group rambunctious" but he then abruptly segues into an account of his efforts leading up to the event, in which he describes himself toiling mightily and almost single-handedly to collect the wood and deliver it to the site using a decrepit cart.

At one point, stuck at the bottom of a steep hill with no help in sight, he notes "But when you become destitute, God's help isn't far", recounting how a carriage appeared to help tow his load up the hill. "I unloaded the cart and built a beautiful pyre that burned great that evening...The fire made us so proud!...it proclaimed a small group of boys and girls were celebrating solstice...to awaken the people of our country. We wanted them to throw off the handcuffs that the Treaty of Versailles had put upon us. The fire was to liberate you from thoughts of egotism...to keep us warm, just like the love for our people and their superior culture...to destroy all disagreements among Germans."

Perhaps becoming self-aware, Mengele askes "Why am I writing all of this down in such detail? One day, when my sons will read these lines, I want them to grasp the enthusiasm we felt back then...Do you understand now why two high school kids pushed a heavy cart through your city? Did they only want to build a big fire, grab a few girls and jump over it? Oh no, boys were not interested in such things back then. We wanted to build a big fire, a reminder to everyone in Germany that the fatherland was in distress...There were many teachers who didn't at all like what we were doing....they tried to pollute our souls."

He describes how they overcame this, "Our voluntary obedience was possible only because we acknowledged that camaraderie was the highest ideal. Whoever disrespected one of our comrades didn't stay long with us."

Another section details in roughly ten paragraphs Mengele's hunt for a Yacare (crocodile) sneaking into the water supply, describing the first time he'd seen a figurine of a crocodile in a church display and his attempts to shoot the creature: "I don't really believe in 'monsters'..."

Next Mengele revisits the themes of eugenics and loyalty as he reviews another book read, The Barrings by William von Simpson, which he says "got to me", likening the death of an older character to that of his own father, but with distinctions: "My father did a better job holding on to his properties, even though they were subsequently divided into different parts."

Critiquing the writing, he continues "Gerda's behavior has no psychological explanation...there is one solution for all of their financial problems: The sick, old man should be substituted with somebody new, but nobody seems to think of that....Their political background is intriguing even though the depiction of World War II is unsatisfying. The author pays too little attention to the question of 'why' things happened." He admits the book is "enthralling" but faults the Prussian nobility for the German loss of the region and the war. "The man who wanted to complete Bismarck's work was not of their standing. They refused to follow him unconditionally and victory was lost".

Later, Mengele discusses India: "British rule in India wasn't that bad and the higher classes (Brahmans, Maharajas) weren't that noble!" Commenting on the book The Great Rain by Louis Bromfield, Mengele believes Bolshevic influence made India into a "gooey mess", adding "This is where the great sadistic problem begins that even Gandhi didn't understand. His adversary understood the dilemma well. I had a chance to work with one of them (Dr. Mitra) at the same scientific institute....the castes are not expressions of prejudice; they convey status and racial qualities within the Indian society...Brahmans are built nicely; some of them even have blue eyes. They have small, straight noses and they're in general high quality human beings. And this is because the Brahmans used the highest caste to preserve their noble blood. They are the descendants of Nordic peoples who once conquered and ruled India."

Relating Indians to the Romans and Greeks, Mengele discusses how to create an upper class: "It can only be done by selecting the best", considering the influences of life experience, schooling, and politics, as well as the unintended circumstances of violence, catastrophe and necessity. "Only the free play of powers can produce substance. We have seen this process in nature and human history alike."

Discussing cycles of class: "...this is only logical and inevitable, and results from selection according to 'performance'. A process was set into motion based on the simple and fundamental truth that human beings are not equal."

Expounding on the professional roles going back to ancient societies: "It was the same in medieval society with nobility, clergy, middle class and those who were in bondage. The class system remains intact as long as the ruling class stays strong and in numbers. The decay begins whenever the ruling class has fewer children, while the lower classes of have-nots reproduce in unlimited numbers." Mengele then comports this with the modern day "...for the first time in human history we don't have any slaves any more, and nobody is in bondage!!"

This takes Mengele back to ancient Rome, where he describes the ascent of the "proles", mixing "highly educated Greek teachers" with "merchants from Syria" and "skilled soldiers from the German forests" and then demanding political change. "When nobility, clerics and bourgeoisie neglected to engage the lower class, and when no fundamental rights were given, violence ensued....lower classes grew and grew. They fought a series of revolutions and succeeded in abolishing everybody's rights...Everywhere else on this planet everybody can try to achieve whatever his plans are. He can work in any profession, he can buy whatever he wants, he can go wherever he wants to go, and he can marry whoever he wants to marry. And sometimes, he can even say what he wants to say."

Mengele continues railing on about natural and human selection, "Maybe there will be a time when people are either unable or unwilling to wage war against eachother (?!) but mankind is doomed even without war." Believing wealth as the current determinate, Mengele expresses a view that overpopulation will eventually overcome us, unless we groom enough creative scientists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians and engineers to guarantee a basic food supply, meet our growing energy needs and find ways to "exploit the Earth in the most rational ways".

He adds "armies of specialists will substitute for slaves" in a complex future in which scientists will be in short supply. Mengele predicts there will be 5 billion people by the year 2000 (he was off by over a billion) but feared the "intelligentsia" would be greatly outnumbered.

Then he cites stats on German and US college enrollment, comparing the paths to success for the technician, the manager, the director and "Joe Shmo". Questioning why societies don't offer much incentive for scientific careers, he asks "Why do you want to be a doctor or a professor if your salary won't even guarantee a lower middle-class existence? At the same time, you'll observe the president of a cannery who knows nothing about food science but knows a lot about advertisement. This man will take cheap fruit and turn it into expensive jam which every housewife will buy. He will be richer than you could ever imagine."

Mengele observes "the number of children is reversed in relation to their parent's social status...unskilled workers have more children than highly trained workers do." This snowballs because the "foreman can make sure his son becomes an engineer if he only has one or two children. His sense of responsibility forces him to have fewer children."

He laments: "But where are we going to get these high-quality human beings if the cradles of the 'intelligentsia' remain empty? Many people thought they were able to disregard the warnings of politicians and eugenics researchers. Where their work was put into practice, their attempts were brutally destroyed. They thought that these dire necessities were irreconcilable with a liberal, democratic wordview."

Mengele states plainly that "Things that were considered trivial when we wanted to preserve our true culture are now seen as imperative to preserve civilization and food supply as a whole." Mengele feels humans must arrange for less survival, as nature once did, noting man's "humanity made him help fellow humans who were unable to cope with life. He kept them alive, and he helped decaying elements of his species to keep procreating. We now have to mobilize higher human abilities again, and we have to make sure that nature's suspended eradication will continue through human arrangements...If we don't want the physically or mentally disabled left to their natural fate, and if we want them to be a burden on society, we should at least be ethical enough to make sure that their inferior genes aren't passed on...We know all the general objections to our point of view, and we consider any kind of a discussion a waste of time."

Next, Mengele fashions a history of traditional "village idiots" who were prevented from reproducing, including females. "The female village idiot has always been a sex object" but rarely had children out of wedlock, he notes, "After the first bastard child, the female idiot experienced so many hostilities and problems that another child was out of the question."

Relating nukes to eugenics, Mengele writes "Nuclear warfare will kill worthy and unworthy life alike, and reduce survival to a mere coincidence." But he predicts "Humans will invent a weapon to counter nuclear weapons. There won't be any more wars until this weapon has been developed".

Relating globalization to eugenics, Mengele imagines "People will stop killing eachother in the name of ideology. And maybe things will be so intertwined and connected that no country on Earth can "go nuts" because it's sharing all the resources with everybody else...But this beautiful dream will only be possible if mankind has enough gifted, talented people available." Otherwise, he says, "Everything will end in a catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons." He predicts 90% of humans will starve due to stupidity with 10% surviving like reptiles when the dinosaurs went extinct.

Mengele offers a "little opus" on prevention of the rise of the "idiot masses", in which every country decides on it's own measures. For Germany, he suggests required training accompanying every marriage certificate, to include counseling in health, genetics, hygiene, sexual psychology, population policy, financial burdens of child rearing, birth control and more. He recommends government subsidies for advanced degrees, and stipends dependent on the genetic qualities of the children. Mengele also requires limiting profits of merchants to support producers.

Mengele then instructs Germany to "Abandon feminist ideology; biology doesn't support equal rights. Women shouldn't be working in higher positions. Women's work has to depend on fulfilling a biological quota. Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized when the number of 5 children has been reached". Mengele recommends making 3-4 children "seem fashionable" and sterilization for any woman over 40 seeking an abortion, adding "Exact statistics will be required."

Though I've only covered here a portion of the material, this diary is without a doubt a fascinating primary document giving deep insight into the mental workings of an extremely controversial historical figure. Not only didn't Mengele show repentance for the eugenics policies he promoted at the Kaiser-Wilhelm institute, he seems to have become more and more obsessed in defense of them by the early 1960s.

In light of recent climate talks in Copenhagen and success in carbon-reduction goals coming through China's highly criticized family planning approaches, this newly discovered diary may add dimension to considerations of how forward-thinking societies can feasibly integrate more sustainability into human endeavors without resorting to the inhuman methods practiced by Dr. Mengele and the Third Reich.

Panetta Turns Blind Eye To CIA Crimes

2010-01-20T14:47:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Panetta-Turns-Blind-Eye-To-by-Sherwood-Ross-100118-945.html

January 20, 2010
By Sherwood Ross

In a tribute to the seven CIA agents killed December 30th by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, Agency Director Leon Panetta wrote, "Our officers were engaged in an important mission in a dangerous part of the world."

What he neglected to tell readers of the Washington Post, the Juneau Empire, the Monterey Herald and other mainstream publicity outlets is that CIA agents, like the United States itself, have no business in that part of the world. The U.S. is only in Afghanistan because eight years ago it launched a war of aggression against that small country and occupied it. Now Panetta is distressed as militants there strike back at the occupiers---occupiers who are breathing life into a crooked, dishonest, Kabul regime whose stellar achievements are dope-peddling and vote-stealing.

Panetta also failed to tell readers that, if not for such CIA actions as the violent overthrow of the government of Iran in 1953 to get that country's oil, and the 2003 U.S. aggression against Iraq to get that country's oil, the Middle East might not be quite so violent today. Those aren't Boy Scout camps President Obama is reinforcing in Afghanistan.

Panetta begins his article of January 13th, "CIA Victories Come At A Cost," by playing on the sympathy of American readers. He opens with the words, "The horrible news on Dec. 30 that a suicide bomber had taken seven American lives in Afghanistan may have been, for some, a stark reminder that we are at war." All well and good as we recall John Donne's famous line "Any man's death diminishes me" and we grieve for the loss of those men and their suffering families.

But Panetta admits in his own words, "In the past year we have done exceptionally heavy damage to al Qaeda. That's why the extremists hit back." Got that? It is extremism for al Qaeda to hit back but it is not extremism for the CIA to launch its drone aerial rocket strikes against al Qaeda---assassination strikes that a protesting Pakistan government has urged the U.S. halt as they are killing innocent civilians, in aggregate probably in the hundreds.

Director Panetta scolds those who fault the slain men (and I do not) for "poor tradecraft" because of what happened at Forward Operating Base Chapman. War is the essence of deception and ugly new tactics only beget ugly new responses. On its face, war is a low-down, sneaky, dishonest business, characterized by surprise attacks, double-dealing, and nauseating violence. That is what the CIA received but that is what the CIA historically has dished out. It is beyond pity that al Qaeda does not see how its own violent tactics only stoke the fires of hatred and conflict. It should be remembered Gandhi liberated India by non-violence, not by suicide bombers. As for America, it daily dishonors the example of Reverend Martin Luther King.

In his article, Panetta praises the slain CIA officers for their "devoted work" and CIA agents in general for their "courage," yet he has not condemned or punished a single CIA agent for the cowardly torturing of Moslem prisoners in chains, and he continues the illegal practice of rendition. Leon Panetta finds evil only where he wants to find it. He is the compliant servant of a war machine that is bent not only on controlling the energy resources of the Middle East but of one which has been systematically ringing the entire planet in military bases from which it can spy upon, and rain destruction upon, any people in any region.

Panetta's expressions of sorrow and regret over the losses of his officers, however genuine and deeply felt, resemble Queen Victoria's expressions of remorse for the fallen troops in the telegrams of congratulations she sent to her generals upon their victories as they expanded the British Empire by criminal force and violence.

Two thousand years ago the Roman emperor Aurelian complained in a letter, "Surely, the gods have decreed that my life should be a perpetual warfare." And while he lamented the deaths of "seven thousand of my soldiers "slain in the contest"in Dacia and the camps along the Danube," Aurelian would have had no complaint had Rome not subjugated those territories, and his troops would have been alive, not dead, if Rome had not occupied them. Americans who wonder today why 5,000 of their troops have died in the Middle East could do no better than to read Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

(Sherwood Ross formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and contributed regular columns to wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

Truth and Consequences: "A Conspiracy of Rich Men"

2010-01-20T13:52:00.000-08:00

http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/01/truth-and-consequences-conspiracy-of.html

Len Hart
The Existentialist Cowboy
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00 EST

Every criminal thinks he will get away with it. Every criminal hides the truth. Every criminal has a cover story. 911 is Bush's 'cover story'. Inexplicably, Bush critics are called 'conspiracy theorists' when, in fact, it was Bush who put forward an absurd theory for which the FBI has said there is no hard evidence.

Now --let's get this straight: the media allows Bush to indulge a stupid theory and even promotes it. But if you should try it, even liberals and progressives who should know better will call you a 'conspiracy theorist'.

The 'official' conspiracy theory of 911 is an absurd and ridiculous fabrication believed only by idiots, a bullshit cover story designed to shock, awe and confuse.

It did this with its sheer audacity and vainglorious hubris. We should not be surprised, nor shocked, nor awed! Every criminal lies about his crime. We should have expected no less, nor more from Bush --a common liar, a common criminal.

There is historical precedent for Dick Cheney's meeting with Bush's financial supporters. A good description of that precedent is found in the work of St. Thomas More who wrote of what he called a 'conspiracy of rich men'. More's description of a 'conspiracy of rich men' presages Hitler's infamous meeting in which he 'closed' a deal with I.G. Farben, Thyssen, Krupp et al. Hitler would wage wars from which his sponsors would benefit if they would 'pony up', if they would finance and support his rise to dictatorship.
For the first time - in the last relatively free election Germany was to have - the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes. Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal.

We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. [note: this is clearly a reference to a 'planned' Reichstag Fire, Hitlers' 911!]

And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)

The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality ... All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3)

--William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Nazification of Germany: 1933 - 34
Hitler began his war on the cheap, clearly hoping to make it all up with war booty. Bush hoped to and did seize the oil fields of Iraq. It was a priority. Nazis are said to have paid 'subsistence wages' for big projects --the autobahn, new public buildings, the grand visions of Albert Speer, most which were never realized. Much is made of the money borrowed from Swiss banking houses. Many historians claim the Wehrmacht was but a shell despite its reputation. Panzer divisions were mechanized, the infantry walked. But, if we are to believe the memoirs of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's money problems had been solved by his industrial and American financiers.

It was Krupp who told the meeting: "Pony up!", pledging himself a million marks to prime the pump. American industrialists --led by Henry Ford --did their part for the Nazi cause. [See: Henry Ford and the Nazis; Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler; Hitler and the rise of the Nazis] By July 1942 'incriminating information' had filtered back to Washington from Ford of France; it was all about Ford's active and financial support for Herr Hitler's war of aggression against the nations of Europe. Not surprisingly, the information was buried, as Fox et al bury anti-Bush information today.

Those who benefit most from 'conspiracies' are motivated to convince you that 'conspiracies do not exist'. But --the fact is no one acting alone is capable of achieving much. Certainly, one person cannot wage 'aggressive war'. One person could not have pulled off 911. It's even difficult for one person to hold up a 7-11. While he discounts 'outrageous conspiracy theories', Bush would have you believe one: the official conspiracy theory of 911!

If 'conspiracies' did not exist, then why has the US Supreme Court handed down so many cases defining them and applying to them the laws of these United States? And why are there so many US laws having to do with 'conspiracies' if 'conspiracies' did not exist?

© Unknown
Thomas Moore
I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.

They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed for the commonwealth's sake, that is to say for the wealth also of the poor people, then they be made laws. But these most wicked and vicious men, when they have by their insatiable covetousness divided among themselves all those things, which would have sufficed all men, yet how far be they from the wealth and felicity of the Utopian commonwealth? Out of the which, in that all the desire of money with the use of thereof is utterly secluded and banished, how great a heap of cares is cut away! How great an occasion of wickedness and mischief is plucked up by the roots!

- Sir Thomas More (1478 - 1535), Utopia, Of the Religions in Utopia
The fascist domination of American life and debate is possible because people have 'bought into' the pernicious notion of 'corporate personhood'. This notion facilitates More's 'conspiracy of rich men'. Mere legal abstractions are absurdly accorded rights that, by right, belong only to real, living, flesh and blood people. Corporations are given license to lie about misdeeds, incompetence and corporate criminality, literally, a 'conspiracy of rich men: the Tea Baggers and idiots who have bought into it; and the GOP consultants, firms, and focus groups who dreamed it all up.

It's all top down, dishonest, disingenuous - symptoms of a failed but criminal organization: the GOP which represents and seeks to enrich the ruling one percent. They are the beneficiaries of GOP tax cuts since Ronald Reagan's infamous tax cut of 1982. Initially, the top 20 percent benefited as charts dating to the beginning of the Clinton administration indicate. Though Clinton succeeded in reversing the trend, much of the groundwork was still in place by the time Bush Jr assumed the White House. Today, as a result, just one percent of all Americans were enriched. The official stats are available from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The story is there for anyone desiring to get at the truth about the criminality of the GOP.

We cannot rely upon the likes of FOX, indeed, any network or media conglomerate to expose this hoax. Fox actively promotes it. And if the other so-called MSM are not overtly supporting, they give it free air time worth billions of dollars.

The NWO means different things to different people. As a result, very little written about it is meaningful or significant. Hitler had in mind a world dominated by the Third Reich. But recent use of the term does not necessarily mean Nazism. In some cases, it may be worse. Muddying the waters are the "Illuminati Conspiracy" theorists which get mixed with with other theories about Jesuits, international bankers and Jews. Who can sort all this stuff out?

There was, in fact, an Illuminati in Europe at the time of the 'Enlightenment'. How the term came to be associated with an obvious and criminal conspiracy like the Skull and Bones, I will never know. I do know this: SCOTUS, Federal Law, numerous lesser courts, a saint (St. Thomas More) and numerous state laws, ordinances and regulations all recognize the fact that crimes not involving conspiracies tend to be petty - simple theft, robbery, mugging etc. Real crimes - like those perped by Enron upon the state of California - are simply impossible for one person working alone. The sheer scale of such crimes require a conspiracy. The genocide of Jews by Hitler's Third Reich 'required' the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. The minutes of Heydrich's meeting at Wannsee are a testament to the coordinated planning required to pull off the murder of millions of people. One person - a lone gunman in a depository window - cannot contemplate or 'pull off' such a crime.

The Director Stanly Kubrick must surely have believed in the Illuminati. Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman was Kubrick's take on the effect that an evil and kooky cult might have on individuals. Religious folk would say of 'members' that they had 'sold their souls'. Is that not what church people themselves have done? In psychological terms, such persons will have compromised their integrity, fracturing the 'personality'. Are there such groups, in fact? Probably! But the thing to be remembered is this: they have NO POWER but the power that is given them by their victims.

With regard to politics, the Skull and Bones is such a group and that they exist is a fact. They have no power but the monies that have been bequeathed them by wealthy Yale alumni and the oaths required of their pledges. This combination is most powerful when the initiate is a believer.

Now - I took an oath once! I pledged an honorary fraternity at University. But the oath I took was to 'integrity', 'scholarship' and the 'pursuit of truth'. I am very, very comfortable with that oath as I believe it to be the basis for a better and more egalitarian world in which individual rights are respected within the framework of a more egalitarian state which respects all peoples and all races. That oath is enough to make me an outlaw among the cultist GOP-inclined.

Lessons from America's Lost Decade

2010-01-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'd say the last three decades were lost ones!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Lessons-from-America-s-Los-by-Robert-Parry-100115-22.html

January 15, 2010
By Robert Parry
From Consortium News

As the United States takes the measure of Barack Obama's first year in the White House and looks beyond to what could be a difficult new decade, it might be useful to first stop and extract some lessons from the 2000s, which proved to be a lost economic decade for many Americans.

For the first time since the Great Depression, the United States experienced zero job growth in a decade. Zero. And zero is actually worse than it sounds since none of the preceding six decades registered job growth of less than 20 percent.

By comparison, the 1970s, which are often bemoaned as a time of economic stagflation and political malaise, registered a 27 percent increase in jobs. Yet, in part because of that relatively slow rise in jobs down from 31 percent in the 1960s American voters turned to Ronald Reagan and his radical economic theories of tax cuts, global "free markets" and deregulation.

Reagan sold Americans on his core vision: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Through his personal magnetism, Reagan turned taxes into a third rail of American politics. He convinced many voters that the government's only important role was funding the military.

Yet, instead of guiding the country to a bright new day of economic vitality, Reagan's approach accelerated a de-industrialization of the United States and a slump in the growth of American jobs, down to 20 percent during the 1980s.

The percentage job increase for the 1990s stayed at 20 percent, although job growth did pick up later in the decade under Democrat Bill Clinton, who raised taxes and moderated some of Reagan's approaches while still pushing "free trade" agreements and deregulation.

Hard-line Reaganomics returned with a vengeance under George W. Bush more tax cuts, more faith in "free trade," more deregulation and the Great American Job Engine finally started grinding to a halt. Zero percent increase.

Despite the painful statistics of the past three decades, Reaganomics remains a powerful force in American political life. Anyone tuning in CNBC or picking up the Wall Street Journal would think that these economic policies had enjoyed unqualified success.

Though the downward economic spiral can be traced over the past three decades, the facts are especially stark for the 2000s, the so-called "Aughts" or perhaps more accurately the "Naughts."

"For most of the past 70 years, the U.S. economy has grown at a steady clip, generating perpetually higher incomes and wealth for American households," wrote Neil Irwin in a Jan. 2, 2010, review of comparative economic data for the Washington Post. "But since 2000, the story is starkly different."

As the Post article and its accompanying graphics show, the last decade's sad story wasn't just limited to the abysmal job numbers.

U.S. economic output slowed to its worst pace since the 1930s, rising only 17.8 percent in the 2000s, less than half the 38.1 percent increase in the despised 1970s. Household net worth declined 4 percent in the last decade, compared to a 28 percent rise in the 1970s. (All figures were adjusted for inflation.)

Even Worse

As grim as those numbers were, the overall economic legacies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush may be even worse.

Not only did the Great American Job Engine grind to a halt in the past decade, but the dire economic numbers were accompanied by massive increases in federal debt, part of a risky right-wing strategy to hamstring the government's ability to ever address domestic problems in the future.

When Reagan took office, the total federal debt was still under $1 trillion ($909 billion). By the end of the 12-year Republican reign of Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the total debt had quadrupled.

The rise in the red ink leveled off under Democrat Bill Clinton. Amazingly, he left office with the federal budget in the black by $236 billion and with a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion.

The budgetary trend lines were such that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan began to fret about the challenges the Fed might face in influencing interest rates if the entire U.S. government debt were paid off, thus leaving no debt obligations to sell.

But Greenspan's nervousness was soon quieted. In 2001, George W. Bush seized the White House after blocking a full counting of legally cast votes in Florida, with the help of five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Then, though lacking a popular mandate Bush also had lost the national popular vote to Al Gore Bush governed as if he had won by a landslide. He pushed through a new round of tax cuts weighted in favor of the wealthy and, after the 9/11 attacks, launched two open-ended wars on borrowed money.

By the time Bush left office in 2009, the annual deficit had gone to $1.3 trillion (from a $236 billion surplus). Total federal debt had risen almost $5 trillion to $10.7 trillion. And the projected 10-year budget outlook called for $8 trillion more in red ink.

Despite this record of economic failure trillions more in debt but no net increase in jobs many Americans appear to have learned no lessons from either the Bush-II presidency or the legacy of Reaganomics. Any thought of raising taxes, addressing long-term problems like health costs, or investing in a stronger domestic infrastructure remains anathema to large segments of the population.

Indeed, across the news media, it is hard to find any serious or sustained criticism of the Reagan/Bush economic theories. Far more blame is heaped on Obama for not having fully turned around the financial and economic crisis that he inherited.

Less than a year into Obama's presidency, voters in Massachusetts may be on the verge of electing a conservative Republican in a special Senate election, according to some polls. That result would enable the GOP to filibuster every significant Obama initiative, from health care to job programs. Many pundits anticipate Republican victories in congressional elections next November.

Who's to Blame?

Some of the fault for these Democratic political troubles can fairly be laid at Obama's door, though surely not all.

Fearing a new Great Depression, Obama did continue Bush's policies for bailing out large banks whose greed and recklessness contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. Obama also alienated his "base" by rejecting calls for investigating Bush-era national security crimes, expanding the Afghan War, and accepting compromises on health-care reform.

Tactically, Obama was played for a sucker when he let health-care negotiations with "moderate" Republicans like Olympia Snowe of Maine drag on past his initial deadline of August. By slow-rolling the process, the Republicans bought time to organize right-wing populist opposition to the reform package and then marched the GOP (Snowe included) in lockstep behind a Senate filibuster of the legislation.

The unified Republican filibuster forced Obama and the Democratic leadership to make deals with conservative Democrats and Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Independent who seemed to enjoy bedeviling the legislative process. To get Lieberman's support, the public option and other popular elements were jettisoned, causing many on the Left to denounce Obama as a sell-out.

Because of all the legislative delays, the health-care bill now hangs on the outcome of the Massachusetts election to fill the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat on Jan. 19.

More generally, few Americans appear to be paying any heed to the lessons of the past three decades. Instead, many are simply reprising the same mistakes.

Republicans and the Right are determined to protect the Reagan-Bush legacies by blocking Democratic domestic legislation that might take the country in a different direction. To stop that possibility, they continue to whip up anti-tax, anti-government furies.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still come across as flaccid protectors of an Establishment that many Americans understandably hate. And the American Left mostly sits in the bleachers booing all the players, rather than getting into the game.

As this new decade dawns, the U.S. political process seems resistant to the one of most obvious lessons of the past three decades: Simply put, Reaganomics didn't work. As George H.W. Bush once commented when he was running against Reagan in the 1980 primaries it is "voodoo economics."

Yet, the fact that the United States has embraced "voodoo economics" for 30 years and refuses to recognize the statistical evidence of Reaganomics' abject failure suggests that the larger lesson of this era and especially this past lost decade is that the U.S. political process is dysfunctional.

Video: The Transparent Cabal

2010-01-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.presstv.com/programs/detail.aspx?sectionid=3510529&id=115483#115483

Press TV
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:33 EST

Dr. Stephen Sniegoski discusses his Transparent Cabal book on Press TV about how the neoconservatives pushed US to war in Iraq to protect Israels interests.

Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war in Iraq, the book forcefully argues that the neocons' goal was not the spread of democracy, but the protection of Israel's interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement has always identified closely with the interests of Israel's Likudnik right wing, the discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote the flow of oil.

Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives, including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will,but as ready after 9/11 for retaliation.

The Implosion of the American Political Consciousness

2010-01-12T14:15:00.001-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/print/51450

January 10, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by David Michael Green

If you're looking for a decent indicator of the political health of the nation, consider the following excerpt from a Christian Science Monitor article this week: "The decision by the White House Friday to not preempt the season premiere of the psychedelic crash-drama "Lost" for the State of the Union address reveals the surprising power of that much ridiculed stereotype: the American couch potato."

Well, at least no one can accuse us of not having our national priorities in order, eh?

Actually, that's only part of the story - and frankly the more benign part, to boot.

Presidents like to say, in their annual messages to Congress and the country, that "The state of the union is strong". Maybe Obama is bold enough to tell a whopper that big even in 2010. I guess when you've taken an entire country over the cliff lying about "hope" and "change", even a stinker that rude wouldn't be so egregious, relatively speaking.

In fact, the health of this country is tenuous, and that's on a real good day. All the obvious and tangible manifestations are there: massive unemployment, polarized wealth suitable for any banana republic, broken government and political system, environmental catastrophe and more. It's almost as if our goal is to commit national suicide in order to keep a whole next generation of Jared Diamonds employed or something.

These are huge problems, they are nigh on intractable, and they are destructive in the extreme. Indeed, so grim is our situation that the only real hope looking forward is for a resurgence of common sense and mutual sacrifice allowing for at least the possibility of finding the national will to address these crises.

But I'm afraid that's where things really start to get grim.

If you're under the age of forty, you might not realize that things weren't ever thus in American politics. The current ugly nature of our political discourse is perhaps simultaneously the greatest ‘victory' and greatest tragedy of the regressive revolution in America these last thirty years. Not only has the state itself been captured for purposes of thorough looting by oligarchs, but the very political consciousness of the nation has been diluted and polluted - all while our faux patriotism is saluted - beyond recognition.

Government is bad. Government always screws up. Corporations are heroic. Greed is good. Conservatism is about protecting freedom. Personal sacrifice for national improvement is for fools. Personal destruction is an appropriate form of politics. Hypocrisy is even more acceptable. There is one set of rules for elites, another for the rest of us.

All these form the fabric of our national ethos today, woven deeply into our political consciousness.

Regressives understand in ways that progressives tend to be clueless about, the simple idea that, who narrates governs. The explanation for the right's visceral appreciation of this wisdom is likely rooted in the survival instinct at the core of the human creature's very DNA. When you're peddling an absolutely absurd and destructive pile of bullshit, even dressing it up in pretty pink ribbons isn't going to be enough. If you hope to have any prayer of making the sale, you gotta teach people from their earliest days that turds are really, really valuable. Get yours now!

This was one of Orwell's most powerful perceptions in 1984, a book loaded with crucial insights about society, politics, government and human nature. The state could expend endless resources battling for the supremacy of a certain type of politics. That's one option. Or, far more cleverly, it could just remove the possibility of imagining alternatives from the public's consciousness. Much easier. Much cheaper. This is why Orwell concentrated so much on language in his novel. He understood that action requires desire, desire requires imagination, and imagination requires language.

American politics and political culture have descended into a grim visage from what they once were, to something taking a form today of which Big Brother could be proud. It's quite true, of course, that there are always nasty actors out there, and that it has at times been worse than it is now. But what's discouraging about our moment is that it comes after, not before, those other times and the better ones that followed. Of course there will always be oscillations from better to worse. But one expects that both will represent improvements over the betters and worses of the past.

But we, in fact, are moving in the opposite direction. The level of vitriol in American politics grows uglier everyday, and the absence of rationality more astonishing. Back in the day, mainstream political actors weren't in the habit of calling the president a fascist, or accusing him of seeking to murder senior citizens. They weren't so unsophisticated as to call him a socialist at the same time they labeled him a fascist. They weren't so intoxicated with their own venom as to believe that a president who so obediently serves the interests of Wall Street - to a degree that might have horrified even Richard Nixon - is some sort of maniacal leftist radical, bent on killing capitalism in America.

Recent polls are showing that generic tea party candidates beat Republicans or Democrats amongst the electorate today. Part of what that makes that as surprising and significant as it is, is that no one really knows what the movement stands for, apart from some inchoate rage against incumbents, taxes and spending (but try to get them to specify what they'd cut, and you'll see how little content there actually is).

All of this represents the pinnacle (one hopes) of regressive efforts to realize Orwell's nightmare scenario. Americans feel rage - as they should - but they don't know what at, exactly, or why. And they certainly don't have the tools to envision better realities. What else could have happened after three decades of right-wing lies, intimidation and destruction? What else could be the product of presidents like Reagan and Bush, who so transparently served the interests of their class, but so effectively wrapped their predations in the maudlin cloth of the flag and the cranked up rhetoric of fear? What else could we expect from the vitriolic demonization of a so-called left so-called alternative like Clinton or Obama, whose politics are essentially the same as Reagan's or Bush's, sans the more nauseating genuflections toward values that, truth be told (and it must never be, of course), only apply to the stupid little people in practice?

The practice of our politics is so broken today, but what pains me worse is that we have gone a long ways toward no longer even possessing the capability of imagining better alternatives. Good Americans - of generous intentions, thoughtful analysis and progressive dispositions - are losing the capacity to imagine genuine alternatives to an American politics which offers the choice between right, far right and hysterical right, all of them differing only in the shading of the patina they spray over their common oligarchical core. No presidents could possibly better serve the interests of the plutocracy than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (indeed, finding any sort of meaningful dividing line between the White House and Wall Street is an increasingly difficult task). And yet those on the right in America foam at the mouth in their rage at these communist infiltrators, while some progressives foolishly believe that Obama is trying his darndest to be a good lad, against a tough situation he's inherited.

This condition represents an utter failure of the imagination, and therefore the startling ‘success' of the regressive framing effort. This limitation of what is conceivable and the concomitant diminishing of expectations is the greatest triumph of right-wing marketing, and it's Orwellian to its core. What makes it especially startling is that the alternatives in question are so commonsensical and so proximate in real life form, and yet even some progressives in America have been trained to lower their expectations enough to ignore the existence of these ideas and models. What could be more basic than removing gushing profits and massive bureaucratic waste from a country's healthcare system, especially one that is groaning so clangorously under the burdens of runaway costs? What could be easier to figure out than nationalized healthcare, when every other developed country in the world already does it? And yet such ideas were nowhere remotely near consideration throughout these long months of tortuous negotiations over ‘reform' of what actually amounts to the care of corporate health in America. And yet even the most pathetic feints in the direction of real solutions - a public option or the extension of Medicare benefits - were immediately dispatched with, so that the profiteers' victory could be unequivocally complete.

Military spending is another excellent example. This country drops twice as much on ‘defense' as what is spent by every other country in the world combined, and we do that despite having not a single state enemy (you know, the kind you could actually use such a military against) anywhere on the horizon. And we do that despite having a nuclear deterrent arsenal that means sure suicide for anyone stupid enough to invade America or even seriously provoke the country. But even if none of that were true, and even if we were spending just a little bit more than necessary for national defense, what might one logically expect of the character of political debate in a country that cannot afford to educate its students, cannot provide healthcare for its citizens, and cannot maintain its infrastructure? What about in a country that cannot do those things, and which also happens to be so deeply in the hole financially that the Treasury Department has been relocated to the floor of the Pacific Ocean? What would you expect to see in a country like that? Perhaps a wee discussion of spending those bucks a bit differently? Would that be so bizarre?

And yet, do we see such a conversation about reducing these obscene expenditures anywhere on the political landscape? Can anyone name a mainstream politician who advocates these views? Can anyone find a major political party saying we need to cut defense spending in half - so that we ‘only' spend as much as all the other 195 countries of the world combined - and then use the proceeds to provide healthcare for all?

We could go on and one here. Where is the great movement for saving the planet from the destruction of global warming, even if it means foregoing that SUV? Where is that most commonsensical call to divorce special interests and their money from American politics? Where are remotely sensible policies on guns or drugs or crime? And so on, and so on. None of this is even close to happening, and it is regressivism's great triumph in removing from the realm of the politically imaginable even those things which are so transparently sensible, even those things which exist en masse in every other developed democracy in the world, even those that fairly scream out for adoption at home.

This failure of the imagination demonstrates better than anything else the full measure of our political impoverishment. What can you say to a country so far gone that it not only cannot swerve the car - even as head-on collision with a speeding freight train is only seconds away - but cannot even imagine swerving it?

"Good night and good luck" certainly comes to mind. But little else.

There are a few signs of hope, of course. Americans at least know enough to know that we're not doing well, which is more than you can say for the good folks of Oceania. We recognize that both major political parties are worthless, though I don't think we quite understand why. We were sensible enough to vote for what was advertised as ‘change' in the last presidential election. But not sensible enough to demand that we actually got it after inauguration day.

And we're also not smart enough to understand why we're dissatisfied with what we've got. But then, how could we be if watching "the psychedelic crash-drama ‘Lost'" on television is more important than the biggest single night of the year on the calendar of our national political discourse? And what an appropriate show to hold out for, eh? Could it get any better than "Lost"? I dunno. Is there a show out there called "Lost, Stupid and Too Lazy to Stop Getting Punked", perhaps?

Our problem isn't that the Obama administration is socialist, but rather that it is a captive of the worst elements of capitalism.

Our problem isn't that our politicians make awful decisions that have nothing to do with advancing our interests, but rather that we keep tolerating politicians who do that.

Our problem isn't that we chose the wrong ideological alternative, but rather that we have so little to choose from.

Indeed, our deepest problem is that we can't even imagine anymore that there could be real choice.

But, hey: Shhhhh!

You're not allowed to say that.

Vulnerability and Other Prey of Psychopaths

2010-01-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/take-all-prisoners/201001/vulnerability-and-other-prey-psychopaths

Vulnerability and Other Prey of Psychopaths
Marisa Mauro, Psy.D.
Psychology Today
Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:49 EST

Certain personality traits may create better perpetrators and, unfortunately certain cues may create better victims. In a study by Wheeler, Book and Costello of Brock University, individuals who self reported more traits associated with psychopathy were more apt to correctly identify individuals with a history of victimization.

In the study, male student participants examined video tapes of twelve individuals walking from behind and rated the ease at which each could be mugged. The men also completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: Version III (Paulhus, Hemphill, & Hare, in press) which measures interpersonal and affective traits associated with psychopathy as well as intra-personal instability and antisocial traits. Finally, they were asked to provide verbal rational for their ratings. Overall results confirmed a strong positive correlation between psychopathy scores and accuracy of victim identification. This means that individuals that score higher for psycopathy are better at selecting victims. Statistically significant results for psychopathy traits including interpersonal manipulation, callous affect and antisocial bevavior were found.

Acknowledging that fault always lies with the perpetrator, this research may empower individuals with a history of or concerns about victimization. As for myself, a prison psychologist often dealing with career criminals and individuals with psychopathic traits, I am convinced, in the course of observation alone, that certain personal characteristics are associated with tendency to be on the receiving end of bullying such as harassment and manipulation. I have found that the demonstration of confidence through body language, speech and affective expression, for example, provides some protection. This sense was confirmed by Wheeler, Book and Costello, who found that increased fluidity projected through one's walking gait was associated with less reporting of victimization. With respect to gait, the authors provide five cues of vulnerability originally reported by Grayson and Stein (1981). They state, "potential victims had longer or shorter strides, had nonlateral weight shifts, had gestured versus postural movements and tended to lift their feet higher while walking."

Besides one's walk, individuals can purposefully project dominance thereby potentially decreasing perceived vulnerability by increasing eye contact, decreasing the use of small body movements of the hands and feet, and increasing large body movements or changes in postural positioning. Personally, I have also found that conscious control of changes in affective expression, particularly through control of fear, surprise and embarrassment, as well as the rate, tone and fluency of speech decreases one's likelihood of victimization or bullying. It is recommended that individuals maintain the general projection of confidence via dominant body language even in situations where they feel safe. Potential perpetrators may perceive changes in body language signaling vulnerability and act on this perception.

Wheeler, S., Book, A., & Costello, K. (2009). Psychopathic traits and perceptions of victim vulnerability. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36(6), 635-648.

The American Elite

2010-01-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200581-The-American-Elite

William Blum
Countercurrents.org
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:46 EST

Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon's diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".

You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.

Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington's on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship. Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil's military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared", and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, "The Right to Memory and the Truth", which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)

In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated - in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles - that without the coup there could have been a "total loss to the West of all South American Republics". (It was actually the beginning of a series of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in "Operation Condor", in which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.)

Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century."

Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:

MANN: I hope you're as happy about Brazil as I am.

LBJ: I am.

MANN: I think that's the most important thing that's happened in the hemisphere in three years.

LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.1

So the next time you're faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even - oh, just choosing a position at random - the presidency of the United States. Keep your eyes focused not on these "liberal" ... "best and brightest" who come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America's past. In its present. In its future. They're the diplomatic equivalent of the guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.

Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are worse.

And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was "a good corrective to three years at Harvard."

Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be Nobel Peace Prize winners

In November I wrote:
Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He's holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Well, on December 10 the president clutched the prize in his blood-stained hands. But then the Nobel Laureate surprised us. On December 17 the United States fired cruise missiles at people in ... not Iran, but Yemen, all "terrorists" of course, who were, needless to say, planning "an imminent attack against a U.S. asset".2 A week later the United States carried out another attack against "senior al-Qaeda operatives" in Yemen.3

Reports are that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway is now in conference to determine whether to raise the maximum number of wars allowed to ten. Given the committee's ignoble history, I imagine that Obama is taking part in the discussion. As is Henry Kissinger.

The targets of these attacks in Yemen reportedly include fighters coming from Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmation of the warnings long given - even by the CIA and the Pentagon - that those US interventions were creating new anti-American terrorists. (That's anti-American foreign policy, not necessarily anything else American.) How long before the United States will be waging war in some other god-forsaken land against anti-American terrorists whose numbers include fighters from Yemen? Or Pakistan? Or Somalia? Or Palestine?

Our blessed country is currently involved in so many bloody imperial adventures around the world that one needs a scorecard to keep up. Rick Rozoff of StopNATO has provided this for us in some detail.4

For this entire century, almost all these anti-American terrorists have been typically referred to as "al-Qaeda", as if you have to be a member of something called al-Qaeda to resent bombs falling on your house or wedding party; as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American terrorism while being a member of al-Qaeda and people retaliating against American terrorism while NOT being a member of al-Qaeda. However, there is not necessarily even such an animal as a "member of al-Qaeda", albeit there now exists "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula". Anti-American terrorists do know how to choose a name that attracts attention in the world media, that appears formidable, that scares Americans. Governments have learned to label their insurgents "al-Qaeda" to start the military aid flowing from Washington, just like they yelled "communist" during the Cold War. And from the perspective of those conducting the War on Terror, the bigger and more threatening the enemy, the better - more funding, greater prestige, enhanced career advancement. Just like with the creation of something called The International Communist Conspiracy.

It's not just the American bombings, invasions and occupations that spur the terrorists on, but the American torture. Here's Bowe Robert Bergdahl, US soldier captured in Afghanistan, speaking on a video made by his Taliban captors: He said he had been well-treated, contrasting his fate to that of prisoners held in US military prisons, such as the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "I bear witness I was continuously treated as a human being, with dignity, and I had nobody deprive me of my clothes and take pictures of me naked. I had no dogs barking at me or biting me as my country has done to their Muslim prisoners in the jails that I have mentioned."5

Of course the Taliban provided the script, but what was the script based on? What inspired them to use such words and images, to make such references?
Cuba. Again. Still. Forever.

More than 50 years now it is. The propaganda and hypocrisy of the American mainstream media seems endless and unwavering. They can not accept the fact that Cuban leaders are humane or rational. Here's the Washington Post of December 13 writing about an American arrested in Cuba:

"The Cuban government has arrested an American citizen working on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development who was distributing cellphones and laptop computers to Cuban activists. ... Under Cuban law ... a Cuban citizen or a foreign visitor can be arrested for nearly anything under the claim of 'dangerousness'."

That sounds just awful, doesn't it? Imagine being subject to arrest for whatever someone may choose to label "dangerousness". But the exact same thing has happened repeatedly in the United States since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We don't use the word "dangerousness". We speak of "national security". Or, more recently, "terrorism". Or "providing material support to terrorism".

The arrested American works for Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), a US government contractor that provides services to the State Department, the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In 2008, DAI was funded by the US Congress to "promote transition to democracy" in Cuba. Yes, Oh Happy Day!, we're bringing democracy to Cuba just as we're bringing it to Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, DAI was contracted by USAID to work in Venezuela and proceeded to fund the same groups that a few months earlier had worked to stage a coup - temporarily successful - against President Hugo Chávez. DAI performed other subversive work in Venezuela and has also been active in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hotspots. "Subversive" is what Washington would label an organization like DAI if they behaved in the same way in the United States in behalf of a foreign government.6

The American mainstream media never makes its readers aware of the following (so I do so repeatedly): The United States is to the Cuban government like al-Qaeda is to the government in Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds or communication equipment from al-Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al-Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents' ties to the United States, evidence usually gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba's "political prisoners" are such dissidents.

The Washington Post story continued:

"The Cuban government granted ordinary citizens the right to buy cellphones just last year." Period.

What does one make of such a statement without further information? How could the Cuban government have been so insensitive to people's needs for so many years? Well, that must be just the way a "totalitarian" state behaves. But the fact is that because of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, with a major loss to Cuba of its foreign trade, combined with the relentless US economic aggression, the Caribbean island was hit by a great energy shortage beginning in the 1990s, which caused repeated blackouts. Cuban authorities had no choice but to limit the sale of energy-hogging electrical devices such as cell phones; but once the country returned to energy sufficiency the restrictions were revoked.

"Cubans who want to log on [to the Internet] often have to give their names to the government."

What does that mean? Americans, thank God, can log onto the Internet without giving their names to the government. Their Internet Service Provider does it for them, furnishing their names to the government, along with their emails, when requested.

"Access to some Web sites is restricted."

Which ones? Why? More importantly, what information might a Cuban discover on the Internet that the government would not want him to know about? I can't imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami. International conferences on all manner of political, economic and social subjects are held regularly in Cuba. What does the American media think is the great secret being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

"Cuba has a nascent blogging community, led by the popular commentator Yoani Sánchez, who often writes about how she and her husband are followed and harassed by government agents because of her Web posts. Sánchez has repeatedly applied for permission to leave the country to accept journalism awards, so far unsuccessfully."

According to a well-documented account7, Sánchez's tale of government abuse appears rather exaggerated. Moreover, she moved to Switzerland in 2002, lived there for two years, and then voluntarily returned to Cuba. On the other hand, in January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. However, the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration.

"'Counterrevolutionary activities', which include mild protests and critical writings, carry the risk of censure or arrest. Anti-government graffiti and speech are considered serious crimes."

Raise your hand if you or someone you know of was ever arrested in the United States for taking part in a protest. And substitute "pro al-Qaeda" for "counterrevolutionary" and for "anti-government" and think of the thousands imprisoned the past eight years by the United States all over the world for ... for what? In most cases there's no clear answer. Or the answer is clear: (a) being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or (b) being turned in to collect a bounty offered by the United States, or (c) thought crimes. And whatever the reason for the imprisonment, they were likely tortured. Even the most fanatical anti-Castroites don't accuse Cuba of that. In the period of the Cuban revolution, since 1959, Cuba has had one of the very best records on human rights in the hemisphere. See my essay: "The United States, Cuba and this thing called Democracy".8

There's no case of anyone arrested in Cuba that compares in injustice and cruelty to the arrest in 1998 by the United States government of those who came to be known as the "Cuban Five", sentenced in Florida to exceedingly long prison terms for trying to stem terrorist acts against Cuba emanating from the US.9 It would be lovely if the Cuban government could trade their DAI prisoner for the five. Cuba, on several occasions, has proposed to Washington the exchange of a number of what the US regards as "political prisoners" in Cuba for the five Cubans held in the United States. So far the United States has not agreed to do so.
Notes

Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-1964 (New York, 1997), p.306. All other sources for this section on Gordon can be found in: Washington Post, December 22, 2009, obituary; The Guardian (London), August 31, 2007; William Blum, "Killing Hope", chapter 27 ?

ABC News, December 17, 2009; Washington Post, December 19, 2009 ?

Washington Post, December 25, 2009 ?

Stop NATO, "2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World", December 30, 2009. To get on the StopNATO mailing list write to r_rozoff@yahoo.com. To see back issues: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/?

Reuters, December 25, 2009 ?
For more details on DAI, see Eva Golinger, "The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela" (2006) and her website, posting for December 31, 2009 ?

Salim Lamrani, professor at Paris Descartes University, "The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez", Monthly Review magazine, November 12, 2009 ?

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/democ.htm ?

-

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

The Quiet Coup

2010-01-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

by Simon Johnson
The Quiet Coup
May 2009

ONE THING YOU learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it borrowed at least $490 billion from global banks and investors on the assumption that the country’s energy sector could support a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As Russia’s oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs, their importance to the political elite increased. Growing political support meant better access to lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign investors could not have been more pleased; all other things being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the implicit backing of their national governments, even if that backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin’s Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It’s a game of musical chairs: there just aren’t enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.

So the IMF staff looks into the eyes of the minister of finance and decides whether the government is serious yet. The fund will give even a country like Russia a loan eventually, but first it wants to make sure Prime Minister Putin is ready, willing, and able to be tough on some of his friends. If he is not ready to throw former pals to the wolves, the fund can wait. And when he is ready, the fund is happy to make helpful suggestions—particularly with regard to wresting control of the banking system from the hands of the most incompetent and avaricious “entrepreneurs.”

Of course, Putin’s ex-friends will fight back. They’ll mobilize allies, work the system, and put pressure on other parts of the government to get additional subsidies. In extreme cases, they’ll even try subversion—including calling up their contacts in the American foreign-policy establishment, as the Ukrainians did with some success in the late 1990s.

Many IMF programs “go off track” (a euphemism) precisely because the government can’t stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program “goes back on track” once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern—and thus win or lose—under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos.

From long years of experience, the IMF staff knows its program will succeed—stabilizing the economy and enabling growth—only if at least some of the powerful oligarchs who did so much to create the underlying problems take a hit. This is the problem of all emerging markets.

Becoming a Banana Republic
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a “buck stops somewhere else” sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for “safety and soundness” were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry’s ascent. Paul Volcker’s monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services.

Click the chart above for a larger view

Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

The Wall Street–Washington Corridor
Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room’s general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t. AIG’s Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as “picking up nickels in front of a steamroller,” this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG’s sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street’s seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street’s mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote Liar’s Poker, an insider’s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street’s hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself “knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share. … They’d read my book as a how-to manual.” Even Wall Street’s criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, became larger than life. In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.

America’s Oligarchs and the Financial Crisis
The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk was distributed safely.

In the summer of 2007, signs of strain started appearing. The boom had produced so much debt that even a small economic stumble could cause major problems, and rising delinquencies in subprime mortgages proved the stumbling block. Ever since, the financial sector and the federal government have been behaving exactly the way one would expect them to, in light of past emerging-market crises.

By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy’s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused.

Stanley O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, pushed his firm heavily into the mortgage-backed-securities market at its peak in 2005 and 2006; in October 2007, he acknowledged, “The bottom line is, we—I—got it wrong by being overexposed to subprime, and we suffered as a result of impaired liquidity in that market. No one is more disappointed than I am in that result.” O’Neal took home a $14 million bonus in 2006; in 2007, he walked away from Merrill with a severance package worth $162 million, although it is presumably worth much less today.

In October, John Thain, Merrill Lynch’s final CEO, reportedly lobbied his board of directors for a bonus of $30 million or more, eventually reducing his demand to $10 million in December; he withdrew the request, under a firestorm of protest, only after it was leaked to The Wall Street Journal. Merrill Lynch as a whole was no better: it moved its bonus payments, $4 billion in total, forward to December, presumably to avoid the possibility that they would be reduced by Bank of America, which would own Merrill beginning on January 1. Wall Street paid out $18 billion in year-end bonuses last year to its New York City employees, after the government disbursed $243 billion in emergency assistance to the financial sector.

In a financial panic, the government must respond with both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is uncertainty—in our case, uncertainty about whether the major banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow of credit, sap consumer confidence, and cripple the economy—ultimately making the problem much harder to solve. Yet the principal characteristics of the government’s response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.

The response so far is perhaps best described as “policy by deal”: when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan—all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again), and AIG (again).

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price significantly higher than the market price—a subsidy that probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the government.

This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in March, “We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people in the private sector saying, ‘We have capital on the sidelines; we want to go after [distressed bank] assets.’” And the plan lets them do just that: “By marrying government capital—taxpayer capital—with private-sector capital and providing financing, you can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that makes sense for the banks.” Kashkari didn’t mention anything about what makes sense for the third group involved: the taxpayers.

Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government’s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change. As an unnamed senior bank official said to The New York Times last fall, “It doesn’t matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns.” But there’s the rub: the economy can’t recover until the banks are healthy and willing to lend.

The Way Out
Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.

At the root of the banks’ problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don’t want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren’t enough to make them healthy (again, they can’t reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don’t lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won’t pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5 trillion (or 10 percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100 years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting.

Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of populism, might help restore the political balance of power and deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. Wall Street’s main attraction—to the people who work there and to the government officials who were only too happy to bask in its reflected glory—has been the astounding amount of money that could be made. Limiting that money would reduce the allure of the financial sector and make it more like any other industry.

Still, outright pay caps are clumsy, especially in the long run. And most money is now made in largely unregulated private hedge funds and private-equity firms, so lowering pay would be complicated. Regulation and taxation should be part of the solution. Over time, though, the largest part may involve more transparency and competition, which would bring financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say: fine.

Two Paths
To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time. If the U.S. were just another country, coming to the IMF with hat in hand, I might be fairly optimistic about its future. Most of the emerging-market crises that I’ve mentioned ended relatively quickly, and gave way, for the most part, to relatively strong recoveries. But this, alas, brings us to the limit of the analogy between the U.S. and emerging markets.

Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money—or at least out of foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world’s most powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along for years—as Japan did during its lost decade—never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never really recovering. A clean break with the past—involving the takeover and cleanup of major banks—hardly looks like a sure thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force it.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.

Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren’t being fleeced?

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress...

2010-01-04T15:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Extortion-is-a-word-rarely-by-Fred-Cederholm-091231-280.html

January 2, 2010
Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress...
By Fred Cederholm

I've been thinking about crime ... extortion, our legislative branch in Washington D.C. the national debt ceiling, the number 60, and healthcare reform.

Crime is a breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority may ultimately levy a conviction. It is interesting to me that for while every crime violates the law, not every violation of the law counts as a crime. When you consider violations or offenses that should be a crime but no law exists on the books, the anomalies of what is truly criminal " well it borders on the absurd.

You see news junkie that I am " I've been closely following the three ring circus that is our US Congress as they hustled and bustled their way to a much needed holiday break from their duties of representing their contributors and those interests which hold the real power in this "land of the Free."

Each (the House of Representatives and the Senate) just passed their own versions of reforming healthcare in this nation. The House version was approximately 1,900 pages while the Senate solution falls somewhere between 2,000 and 2,100 pages.

When you consider the "incorporations by reference" to earlier legislation, the number of pages snowballs for each version. I have little doubt that the actual "bills" were written by the lobbyists and the attorneys for the healthcare industry. Then too, there are the pork projects, freebees, and initiatives that were extorted by the Reps and Senators to the buy their vote. These added much poundage to the weighty bills which will now be reconciled in committee.

Extortion is a word rarely (if ever) used to describe the US Congress. We generally think of it as protection monies paid to "da boiz so that dey won't break your knees." Congress has refined extortion to an art form. (They are much more civilized and oh so genteel about what the do!) They don't see their shenanigans as anything but being good representatives to their constituents (make that their largest contributors)! Getting "boot" for your homeland is just a matter of "bringin' home da bacon."

This maybe wouldn't be such a hot button item for me if there were mega billions of cash piled around needing a place to be spent. Let's face it, the United States is already broke and every marginal dollar of expenditure goes directly to increase the debt. With all the fanfare on health care (which really has nothing to do with the healthy) you might have missed that Congress raised the debt ceiling to $12.4 trillion. The hope is that nobody will notice and this second raise will get the incumbents thru the 2010 election. If that doesn't meet the deadline the government just won't pay their bills for a while.

It is not just the Federal Government which is in the hole and sinking deeper. All but about four or five states are sinking deeper underwater as well. 40 states have exhausted their unemployment benefit pool. This is after borrowing some $24 billion from Uncle $ugar -- who basically printed the money to help out. During 2010 another $90 billion will be "borrowed" from the Feds by the States to meet their mandated unemployment payments. So much for the "jobless recovery," now think tanks are suggesting that unemployment won't return to the "normal" unemployment of 5% or less until 2015 to 2017. That is six to eight years down the road.

Uncle $ugar just loves to help out whoever is squealing the loudest. Some largess comes to those in "need" via a blanket bailout. These are truly rare though. The number 60 (or 60%) is important in Congress. This is the "super majority" threshold number of members required to vote on a growing number of actions. It is also the number needed to override the filibusters, and bring an action to a floor vote. If all Democrats (and every independent vote together), Republicans basically do not have a voice.

The House and the Senate "Health Care Bills" needed 60 votes (or 60%) to get over the first hurdles. Most party loyalists fell in line and voted the way Pelosi and Reid wanted. There were however a few holdouts which sold out (or rather extorted their votes) for the fat cats back home. This porcine greed ranged from limiting the cutbacks in medicine payments to a decline of a mere $100 billion (when four times that was possible).

30 to 50 million people will be required to buy insurance from the existing insurers, or pay up to 8% of their wages as a penalty.

One major insurer got a permanent exemption from penalties; it faced from the beneficiaries of their "golden policies" and Illinois got, well, a Federal Prison!

Ah, politics!

Right and Left Agree: Mandates are the Road to Neo-Feudalism

2009-12-31T11:50:00.001-08:00

http://firedoglake.com/2009/12/30/right-and-left-agree-mandates-are-the-road-to-neo-feudalism/

December 30, 2009 by firedoglake.com
Right and Left Agree: Mandates are the Road to Neo-Feudalism
by Jane Hamsher

There is tremendous fear rising on both the right and the left that the announced intention of Congress - to force every American to pay tribute to private corporations, with no government alternative - sets a dangerous and frightening precedent with implications far outside the scope of health care.

If the health care bill written by the Senate is passed, middle class Americans will be mandated to pay almost as much to private insurance companies as they do to the federal government in taxes, with the IRS acting as a collection agency for penalties of 2% of your annual income for refusing to comply.

This is just one of many recent measures that have brought liberal progressives and conservative libertarians together to join forces in opposition:

Democrat Alan Grayson worked successfully this year with Republican Ron Paul to pass legislation to audit the Federal Reserve, with 317 cosponsors as diverse as Dennis Kucinich and Michelle Bachmann.
On December 3 , the liberal Campaign for America's Future wrote a letter to the Senate opposing the reconfirmation of Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke until such an audit has been conducted. The letter was signed by James Galbraith, Robert Weisman, Chris Bowers and myself on the left, and Grover Norquist, Phillis Schlafly, and Larry Greenley on the right. Financial blogger Tyler Durden and young organizer Tiffiniy Cheng joined them.
Also on December 3 , conservative Jim Bunning joined liberal Bernie Sanders in placing a hold on the Bernanke nomination until the Fed had been audited.
On December 15 , CAF again sent a letter to the Senate Banking Committee, asking them to delay the vote on the Bernanke confirmation until Audit the Fed received a stand alone vote in the Senate. It was signed by Matt KIbbe of Freedomworks, John Tate of the Campaign for Liberty, and Grover Norquist on the right, and David Swanson of AfterDowiningStreet, Dean Baker and Robert Borosage on the left.
On December 21 , a letter was written opposing the mandate in the health care bill. It was signed by Bob Fertik of Democrats.com, Howie Klein of DownWithTyranny, Brad Friedman of Velvet Revolution, Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America on the left and Grover Norquist, Jim Martin of 60 Plus Association, Duane Parde of the National Taxpayers Union on the right.
On December 23 , Grover Norquist and I sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling for an investigation into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's conflicts of interest before the White House could lift the cap on the commitment to them from $400 billion to $800 billion with no Inspector General in place.
The individuals on both sides of the political spectrum who signed these letters agree on very little, but they do share both a tremendous concern for the corporatist control of government that politicians in both parties seem hell-bent on achieving.

In 2003, the Democrats railed in opposition when the Republicans passed Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage that didn't allow for negotiated drug prices. And in 2006 when Democrats took over Congress, one of the hallmarks of their first hundred days was passing legislation allowing Medicare to do so, supported by both Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. Of course, it had no chance of passing with George Bush in the White House.

Candidate Barack Obama said the ability to negotiate for drug prices would save $30 billion a year in medical costs. Yet when President Obama got to the White House, one of the first things he did was negotiate a secret deal with PhRMA that prevented drug price negotiations in exchange for $150 million in political advertising to help vulnerable Democrats in the House and in support of the health care bill.

In the Senate, Tom Carper said that because PhRMA had paid for the deal with political advertising, they were obligated to abide by it.

Jeff Sessions railed against the corrupt PhRMA deal that didn't allow for prescription drug price negotiation. He didn't mention that he voted for the 2000 bill without it, and when he had the chance to vote for it in the Senate in 2006, he voted "no" himself. Both parties are equally blameworthy - the only difference is who is in power and taking PhRMA's money.

The PhRMA deal is one of many negotiated by the White House this last summer which formed the underpinnings of the health care bill . From then on, it just became a matter of which member was going to extract what deals for their votes, and who was going to take the blame for cutting popular elements from the legislation that the corporate "stakeholders" didn't want.

As FDL's Jon Walker wrote recently , if the ability to cut health care costs hadn't been auctioned off to private corporations in exchange for political patronage, there would have been no government subsidy necessary to make insurance coverage affordable.

We are ceding control of the government to private corporations, not figuratively but literally. When the Senate Finance Committee bill was released earlier this year, the "author" was a former VP of Wellpoint . Liberals, conservatives and independents alike are all justifiably alarmed at what this represents.

It is tragic that health care for the poor is being held hostage to the corporatist agenda, a fig leaf to buy public support and disguise this bill for what it is. As blogger Marcy Wheeler noted in a piece called Health Care and the Road to Neo-Feudalism:

I understand the temptation to offer 30 million people health care. What I don't understand is the nonchalance with which we're about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance in doing so.

Just as those on the libertarian right were demonized by the Republican establishment for opposing the Iraq war during the Bush years, so progressives on the left are being pilloried for "damaging the cause" by joining with Republicans to oppose these extreme measures. It's ironic that the most virulent supporters of a President who ran on "bipartisanship" should reject it so vehemently when it becomes critical of the policies pursued by his White House.

This "right-left wraparound" is happening because politicians in both parties have become so unresponsive to popular sentiment: public support for stifling investigation of the bank bailouts just to protect the President are infinitesimally small, and fortunately Dennis Kucinich announced today that he would commence an investigation into the Fannie/Freddie bailout. But it's a testament to the extreme nature of what is happening to our government that such traditional political foes could find common cause in opposing it.

It's foolish to say that only those who agree with you on every issue are allowed to share your opinion when it comes to opposing something like the mandated bailout of Aetna - it isn't necessary to achieve health care reform. As Jon Walker notes , removing the mandate would reduce the CBO score and its inclusion in the health care bill with no government alternative is unacceptable for moral, political and policy reasons .

Candidate Obama himself opposed the mandate . Keith Olberman and Howard Dean concur.

As Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos said, "remove the mandate or kill this bill." We've opened a "war room" at Firedoglake with information about calling your member of Congress to demand that this provision to bail out the insurance industry be removed from the health care bill before they agree to cast their vote in favor of it.

And nobody needs to pass an ideological purity test before they can use it.

Join us to oppose the mandate. Enter the war room .

The Constitution or the Culture War?

2009-12-31T10:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.amconmag.com/tactv/

The Constitution or the Culture War?
Posted on December 21st, 2009 by Jack Hunter

Explaining the need for his “Stand Up for Christmas” resolution, Congressman Henry Brown of South Carolina released the following statement:

“I am troubled by the growing sentiment that the phrase ‘Merry Christmas’ is not appropriate and I am worried that attempts to celebrate a ‘politically correct’ holiday season may cause the loss of some of the traditions sacred to this widely celebrated holiday.”

For this stance, FOX News pundit Bill O’Reilly declared Brown a “patriot.”

Many have debated whether there actually exists a “war on Christmas,” with many conservatives answering in the affirmative and many liberals insisting that the whole thing is a manufactured seasonal ruse, exploited by opportunistic Republicans like Brown. While there is no doubt an increasing reluctance to use the word “Christmas” in public, especially within government and corporate institutions, liberals are right that the “war on Christmas” is often nothing more than an excuse to engage in cheap political opportunism and Brown’s “Stand Up for Christmas” legislation is a perfect example.

Brown is an archetype of the conventional Republican–a big spending, big government politician who constantly appeals to his base with ineffectual, conservative sounding rhetoric about peripheral social issues. It’s not that issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the 2nd amendment aren’t important–it’s just that most Republican politicians’ stances on these issues rarely produce anything that actually advances any conservative agenda. There is never a grand strategy–but always plenty of grandstanding.

For example, when Brown’s fellow South Carolinian, Lindsey Graham was attacked by his constituents for his big government record during a town hall meeting in October, the senator immediately touted his pro-life, pro-gun record instead, as if his position on those issues should excuse his support for spending trillions of taxpayer dollars. Likewise, Republicans like Brown supported every bit of President Bush’s spending, including the monstrous TARP, but by God, such Republicans want you to know those baby-killin’, gay-lovin’, gun-hatin’ liberals are going to hear “Merry Christmas” whether they like it or not!

For decades, such posturing on social issues has kept the biggest, big government Republicans in office and similarly, Brown’s supposed concern for the “traditions,” “sacred” to Christmas come off as grandstanding precisely because he is. Even many of those who agree with his sentiments concerning the loss of Christmas and its traditions, including this writer, can still see right through the opportunistic Brown.

And yet who can blame Henry? Grandstanding is often all it takes. When Brown’s fellow South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson yelled “you lie!” at President Obama during his speech on healthcare in September, Wilson became an instant celebrity amongst conservatives, and Republicans across the country swelled his campaign coffers. Yet, few have stopped to recall that Wilson supported every bit of Bush’s spending, including TARP, making him little different from Brown and the rest of the usual suspects up on Capitol Hill. But still, say many conservatives, Joe Wilson sure told that Obama!

And now Brown wants to tell you “Merry Christmas.” Let’s face facts: social issues conservatism has been a tragedy since day one, never producing anything of value to social conservatives while at the same time giving cover to an entrenched Republican establishment hellbent on doing their fiscal worst. It’s hard to believe that most pro-life Republican politicians have ever had any real intention of overturning Roe v. Wade precisely because it is not in their interest to do so–simply opposing the law of the land on abortion has long served GOP politicians far better than if that particular Supreme Court decision had never been made.

If Congressman Brown or any of his Republican colleagues truly wanted to preserve “sacred traditions,” they could quit insulting their constituents intelligence with their feigned concern for life, marriage, guns and Christmas, and revisit the U.S. Constitution, something they took an oath to uphold upon entering office-and have taken a “happy holiday” from ever since.

The greatest threat to American security lies within our own society

2009-12-30T13:48:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-greatest-threat-to-Ame-by-michael-payne-091228-737.html

December 29, 2009
The greatest threat to American security lies within our own society
By michael payne

The latest terrorist incident in which a Nigerian man attempted to explode a bomb on a plane bound for Detroit has planted yet another dose of fear into the American psyche. Our society lives in constant fear of the next big terrorist attack, as visions of the 9/11 nightmare continue to plague our minds. But Americans must accept this reality; while terrorists remain a distinct danger, the greatest threat to our national security is the violence within our own society.

Remember the insightful words of Pogo, the legendary comic strip character who said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo could not have been more right. Look around, do you not see what is happening in America and what we are doing to ourselves?

Violence in America, in all its many forms, is running rampant before our very eyes. But we seem to be so obsessed with the fear of terrorist threats from abroad that we hardly notice the violence being committed on a daily basis within our society. Over time, we apparently have become so mentally conditioned that this violence has now become a normal part of our culture. A passage from the Bible states, "There will always be wars," and, perhaps, in our minds we have come to accept "there will always be violence."

The tragedy of 9/11 resulted in the loss of about 3,000 people, certainly a day of infamy. But let's take a look at the extent of violence being committed within this nation, for the large part, by Americans against their fellow Americans. These statistics are for the year 2008, but they are representative of the trend in the last decade.

Murders - 16,272

Rapes - 89,000

Robberies - 441,855

Assaults - 834,855

Burglaries 2,222,196

Look at those frightening statistics. They show that our society is literally under siege. But do we Americans get upset about them; are we outraged and gravely worried about our security? The national media cover every incident 24/7, from kidnappings and murders of children, to hostages being taken by a deranged killer. But is there any hue and cry coming from either the people of this society or from the media that these things must no longer be tolerated in America? The media routinely reports and we routinely watch.

On the other hand, what happens after an incident like the recent one in which an apparent terrorist from Nigeria almost succeeded in blowing up a plane headed for Detroit? Well, there is an instant reaction of great shock and fear that our national security could have been compromised so easily. There are immediate calls for an investigation and even demands for firing officials in the Department of Homeland Security.

What is happening in America is very difficult to comprehend. One incident involving a terrorist threat can set off a massive reaction in our society, while numerous acts of extreme societal violence have become almost commonplace in our lives.

To the more than 16,000 murders committed in 2008, we must add the many thousands of victims who have been gravely wounded and will never again lead normal lives. Yes, murders are the most grievous examples of violence in America, but we cannot minimize the impact of other crimes of violence, for they also result in extreme suffering by those who have been the victims of an attack. Just think of how many violent cases of rape have brought terrible mental anguish upon their victims.

I can see potential ways by which we could substantially reduce both the threats of terrorists from abroad as well as the threats emanating from our own society. But to have this happen would take a monumental change in how we Americans deal with violence, both domestically and around the world.

With regard to threats from abroad, we need to ask ourselves exactly what causes them. Why is it that the terrorists want to do harm to Americans here in our country? If we are completely objective and honest in our assessment, then I believe that we will reach the conclusion it is due to the aggressive actions of the U.S. military in foreign lands. Without a doubt, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, near the Islamic holy city of Mecca, was strongly opposed by those who considered it to be a violation of sacred ground and that it became a prime motivation for Osama Bin Laden's jihad against America.

That very same case can be made with regard to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. George Bush may have thought that he was being guided by "his god" to engage in these two wars, but those of other faiths on the receiving end of the shock and awe found it to be very offensive and totally unacceptable; and they became insurgents.

More and more jihadists are emerging in Yemen, Somalia and other nations that are determined to stop the spread of America's military presence in the world. It is a fact that our increasing military actions around the world have become a very effective recruiting tool that sends tens of thousands more into the ranks of the insurgents.

There is a solution that could be applied to address both the issue of potential terrorist attacks from abroad and the violence being committed within our own society. Consider this: the more instances in which the U.S. invades and occupies other nations that "we think" may do us harm, the more enemies and terrorists will be created. But if we totally renounce the misguided Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, then, over a period of time, we will see a significant reduction in those enemies who want to exact revenge.

I know many will say that this is being soft on terrorism, but the strategy of using our military forces to go after suspected terrorists in numerous countries is simply not working. If we keep making more and more enemies as a result of our actions, then we will lock ourselves into perpetual war. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That is exactly what is happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

To use a sports analogy, it is widely believed that "defense wins championships." Take, for example, a basketball team that has a great offense, constantly attacks the basket and rolls up huge scores, but it has not been taught to play strong defense. That team does not win championships. In offensive power, America has no peer. But offense alone can't solve our problems. It is simply not working and it's time to completely rethink our policies and strategies.

We must develop new strategies and innovative thinking to address this critical issue. In other words, if we take those hundreds of billions of dollars that are being used for bombs and bullets for destructive purposes and, instead, use them domestically, we can find more effective ways to develop tighter security systems to protect us from potential terrorists and also to drastically reduce domestic violence.

Should we fail or refuse to make significant changes in our thinking about how we address and deal with all forms of violence, then we are on a course of never-ending war and continued domestic turmoil.

Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA?

2009-12-30T07:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/29-8

December 29, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA?
by Ray McGovern

In the past I have alluded to Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs. The reference is to CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his moral-dwarf predecessors-the ones who sent President Barack Obama a letter on Sept. 18 asking him to "reverse Attorney General Holder's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations."

Panetta reportedly was also dead set against reopening the investigation-as he was against release of the Justice Department's "torture memoranda" of 2002, as he has been against releasing pretty much anything at all-the President's pledges of a new era of openness, notwithstanding. Panetta is even older than I, and I am aware that hearing is among the first faculties to fail. Perhaps he heard "error" when the President said "era."

As for the benighted seven, they are more to be pitied than scorned. No longer able to avail themselves of the services of clever Agency lawyers and wordsmiths, they put their names to a letter that reeked of self-interest-not to mention the inappropriateness of asking a President to interfere with an investigation already ordered by the Attorney General.

Three of the seven-George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden-were themselves involved, in one way or another, in planning, conducting, or covering up all manner of illegal actions, including torture, assassination, and illegal eavesdropping. In this light, the most transparent part of the letter may be the sentence in which they worry: "There is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused."

When asked about the letter on the Sunday TV talk shows on Sept. 20, Obama was careful always to respond first by expressing obligatory "respect" for the CIA and its directors. With Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation, though, Obama did allow himself a condescending quip. He commented, "I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look out for an institution that they helped to build."

That quip was, sadly, the exception to the rule. While Obama keeps repeating the mantra that "nobody is above the law," there is no real sign that he intends to face down Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs-no sign that anyone has breathed new life into federal prosecutor John Durham, to whom Holder gave the mandate for further "preliminary investigation." What is generally forgotten is that it was former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who picked Durham two years ago to investigate CIA's destruction of 91 tapes of the interrogation of "high-value detainees."

Durham had scarcely been heard from when Holder added to Durham's job-jar the task of conducting a preliminary investigation regarding the CIA torture specialists. These are the ones whose zeal led them to go beyond the already highly permissive Department of Justice guidelines for "harsh interrogation."

Durham, clearly, is proceeding with all deliberate speed (emphasis on "deliberate"). Someone has even suggested-I trust, in jest-that he has been diverted to the search for the money and other assets that Bernie Maddow stashed away.

In any case, do not hold your breath for findings from Durham anytime soon. Holder appears in no hurry. And President Obama keeps giving off signals that he is afraid of getting crosswise with the CIA-that's right, afraid.

Not Just Paranoia

In that fear, President Obama stands in the tradition of a dozen American presidents. Harry Truman and John Kennedy were the only ones to take on the CIA directly. Worst of all, evidence continues to build that the CIA was responsible, at least in part, for the assassination of President Kennedy. Evidence new to me came in response to things I included in my article of Dec. 22, "Break the CIA in Two."

What follows can be considered a sequel that is based on the kind of documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts positively lust.

Unfortunately for the CIA operatives who were involved in the past activities outlined below, the temptation to ask Panetta to put a SECRET stamp on the documentary evidence will not work. Nothing short of torching the Truman Library might conceivably help. But even that would be a largely feckless "covert action," copy machines having long since done their thing.

In my article of Dec. 22, I referred to Harry Truman's op-ed of exactly 46 years before, titled "Limit CIA Role to Intelligence," in which the former President expressed dismay at what the Central Intelligence Agency had become just 16 years after he and Congress created it.

The Washington Post published the op-ed on December 22, 1963 in its early edition, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media ignored it. The long hand of the CIA?

Truman wrote that he was "disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment" to keep the President promptly and fully informed and had become "an operational and at times policy-making arm of the government."

The Truman Papers

Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only "when I had control."

In Truman's view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles CIA Director. Dulles' forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, "regime change"), and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high in the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.

Accustomed to the carte blanche given him by Eisenhower, Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy came on the scene and had the temerity to ask questions about the Bay of Pigs adventure, which had been set in motion under Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles reacted with disdain and set out to mousetrap the new President.

Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes Dulles explains that, "when the chips were down," the new President would be forced by "the realities of the situation" to give whatever military support was necessary "rather than permit the enterprise to fail."

Additional detail came from a March 2001 conference on the Bay of Pigs, which included CIA operatives, retired military commanders, scholars, and journalists. Daniel Schorr told National Public Radio that he had gained one new perception as a result of the "many hours of talk and heaps of declassified secret documents:"

"It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Richard Bissell had their own plan on how to bring the United States into the conflict...What they expected was that the invaders would establish a beachhead...and appeal for aid from the United States...

"The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead.

"In fact, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed," added Schorr.

The "enterprise" which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to what the Russians might do in reaction. Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak; fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion in April 1961; and told a friend that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

The outrage was mutual, and when Kennedy himself was assassinated on November 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman that the disgraced Dulles and his outraged associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a President they felt was soft on Communism-and, incidentally, get even.

In his op-ed of December 22, 1963 Truman warned: "The most important thing...was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions." It is a safe bet that Truman had the Bay of Pigs fiasco uppermost in mind.

Truman called outright for CIA's operational duties [to] be terminated or properly used elsewhere." (This is as good a recommendation now as it was then, in my view.)

On December 27, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a "Dear Boss" letter applauding Truman's outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA "a different animal than I tried to set up for you." Souers specifically lambasted the attempt "to conduct a ‘war' invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover."

Souers also lamented the fact that the agency's "principal effort" had evolved into causing "revolutions in smaller countries around the globe," and added:

With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some."

Clearly, CIA's operational tail was wagging the substantive dog-a serious problem that persists to this day. For example, CIA analysts are super-busy supporting operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan; no one seems to have told them that they need to hazard a guess as to where this is all leading and whether it makes any sense.

That is traditionally done in a National Intelligence Estimate. Can you believe there at this late date there is still no such Estimate? Instead, the President has chosen to rely on he advice of Gen. David Petraeus, who many believe will be Obama's opponent in the 2012 presidential election.

Fox Guarding Henhouse?

In any case, the well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK's assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a targeted domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman's and Souers' warnings about covert action.

So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964 he spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman.

No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was "all wrong," and that Truman "seemed quite astounded at it."

No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case.

A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a June 10, 1964 letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in "strange activities."

Dulles and Dallas

Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA files a fabricated retraction. My guess is that in early 1964 he was feeling a good bit of heat from those suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, one or two not-yet-intimidated columnists were daring to ask how the truth could ever come out with Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission. Prescient.

Dulles feared, rightly, that Truman's limited-edition op-ed might yet get some ink, and perhaps even airtime, and raise serious questions about covert action. Dulles would have wanted to be in position to flash the Truman "retraction," with the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud. The media had already shown how co-opted-er, I mean "cooperative"-it could be.

As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to exculpate himself and any of his associates, were any commissioners or investigators-or journalists-tempted to question whether the killing in Dallas might have been a CIA covert action.

Did Allen Dulles and other "cloak-and-dagger" CIA operatives have a hand in killing President Kennedy and then covering it up? The most up-to-date-and, in my view, the best-dissection of the assassination appeared last year in James Douglass' book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes the answer is Yes.

This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Operation Northwoods US PLANNED FAKE TERROR ATTACKS ON CITIZENS TO CREATE SUPPORT FOR CUBAN WAR

2009-12-29T06:06:00.000-08:00

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/northwoods.html

From BODY OF SECRETS, James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001, p.82 and following.
Scanned and edited by NY Transfer News.

...In [Joint Chief's chair] Lemnitzer's view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over. [JFK assassination legend has it some general presided over the fudgy JFK autopsy. --Mk]

For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. "The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike," said one report at the time. "President Kennedy was pilloried by the super patriots as a 'no-win' chief . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . Active-duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere."

Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Operation Northwoods
Click images for full sized scans [Go to URL to see]

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

The idea may actually have originated with President Eisenhower in the last days of his administration. With the Cold War hotter than ever and the recent U-2 scandal fresh in the public's memory, the old general wanted to go out with a win. He wanted desperately to invade Cuba in the weeks leading up to Kennedy's inauguration; indeed, on January 3 he told Lemnitzer and other aides in his Cabinet Room that he would move against Castro before the inauguration if only the Cubans gave him a really good excuse. Then, with time growing short, Eisenhower floated an idea. If Castro failed to provide that excuse, perhaps, he said, the United States "could think of manufacturing something that would be generally acceptable." What he was suggesting was a pretext a bombing, an attack, an act of sabotage carried out secretly against the United States by the United States. Its purpose would be to justify the launching of a war. It was a dangerous suggestion by a desperate president.

Although no such war took place, the idea was not lost on General Lemnitzer But he and his colleagues were frustrated by Kennedy's failure to authorize their plan, and angry that Castro had not provided an excuse to invade.

The final straw may have come during a White House meeting on February 26, 1962. Concerned that General Lansdale's various covert action plans under Operation Mongoose were simply becoming more outrageous and going nowhere, Robert Kennedy told him to drop all anti-Castro efforts. Instead, Lansdale was ordered to concentrate for the next three months strictly on gathering intelligence about Cuba. It was a humiliating defeat for Lansdale, a man more accustomed to praise than to scorn.

As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly "go soft" on Castro, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade Cuba quickly slipping away. The attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead and Castro, unfortunately, appeared to have no inclination to launch any attacks against Americans or their property Lemnitzer and the other Chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion into hating Cuba so much that they would not only go along, but would insist that he and his generals launch their war against Castro. "World opinion, and the United Nations forum," said a secret JCS document, "should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere."

Operation Northwoods called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths, all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer financed homes and limousines.

One idea seriously considered involved the launch of John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. On February 20,1962, Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his historic journey. The flight was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic.]"

This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans." Thus, as NASA prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext to launch a war.

Glenn lifted into history without mishap, leaving Lemnitzer and the Chiefs to begin devising new plots which they suggested be carried out "within the time frame of the next few months."

Among the actions recommended was "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This included dressing "friendly" Cubans in Cuban military uniforms and then have them "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

The suggested operations grew progressively more outrageous. Another called for an action similar to the infamous incident in February 1898 when an explosion aboard the battleship Maine in Havana harbor killed 266 U.S. sailors. Although the exact cause of the explosion remained undetermined, it sparked the Spanish-American War with Cuba. Incited by the deadly blast, more than one million men volunteered for duty. Lemnitzer and his generals came up with a similar plan. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they proposed; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

There seemed no limit to their fanaticism: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," they wrote. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States.

We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

Bombings were proposed, false arrests, hijackings:

*"Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."

*"Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation."

*"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Among the most elaborate schemes was to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight."

Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs worked out a complex deception:

An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CJA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida.

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.

Finally, there was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place.

In the final sentence of his letter to Secretary McNamara recommending the operations, Lemnitzer made a grab for even more power asking that the Joint Chiefs be placed in charge of carrying out Operation Northwoods and the invasion. "It is recommended," he wrote, "that this responsibility for both oven and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

At 2:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 13, 1962, Lemnitzer went over last-minute details of Operation Northwoods with his covert action chief, Brigadier General William H. Craig, and signed the document. He then went to a "special meeting" in McNamara's office. An hour later he met with Kennedy's military representative, General Maxwell Taylor. What happened during those meetings is unknown. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer that there was virtually no possibility that the U.S. would ever use overt military force in Cuba.

Undeterred, Lemnitzer and the Chiefs persisted, virtually to the point of demanding that they be given authority to invade and take over Cuba. About a month after submitting Operation Northwoods, they met the "tank," as the JCS conference room was called, and agreed on the wording of a tough memorandum to McNamara. "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the Cuban problem must be solved in the near future," they wrote. "Further, they see no prospect of early success in overthrowing the present communist regime either as a result of internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures. Accordingly they believe that military intervention by the United States will be required to overthrow the present communist regime."

Lemnitzer was virtually rabid in his hatred of Communism in general and Castro in particular "The Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that the United States can undertake military intervention in Cuba without risk of general war" he continued. "They also believe that the intervention can be accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunities for solicitation of UN action." However; what Lemnitzer was suggesting was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S. military-controlled police state. "Forces would assure rapid essential military control of Cuba," he wrote. "Continued police action would be required."

Concluding, Lemnitzer did not mince words: "[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty."

By then McNamara had virtually no confidence in his military chief and was rejecting nearly every proposal the general sent to him. The rejections became so routine, said one of Lemnitzer's former staff officers, that the staffer told the general that the situation was putting the military in an "embarrassing rut." But Lemnitzer replied, "I am the senior military office--it's my job to state what I believe and it's his [McNamara's] job to approve or disapprove." "McNamara's arrogance was astonishing," said Lemnitzer's aide, who knew nothing of Operation Northwoods. "He gave General Lemnitzer very short shrift and treated him like a schoolboy. The general almost stood at attention when he came into the room. Everything was 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir.'

Within months, Lemnitzer was denied a second term as JCS chairman and transferred to Europe as chief of NATO. Years later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer, a darling of the Republican right, to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Lemnitzer's Cuba chief, Brigadier General Craig, was also transferred. Promoted to major general, he spent three years as chief of the Army Security Agency, NSA's military arm.

Because of the secrecy and illegality of Operation Northwoods, all details remained hidden for forty years. Lemnitzer may have thought that all copies of the relevant documents had been destroyed; he was not one to leave compromising material lying around. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle, for example, he ordered Brigadier General David W Gray, Craig's predecessor as chief of the Cuba project within the JCS, to destroy all his notes concerning Joint Chiefs actions and discussions during that period. Gray's meticulous notes were the only detailed official records of what happened within the JCS during that time. According to Gray, Lemnitzer feared a congressional investigation and therefore wanted any incriminating evidence destroyed.

With the evidence destroyed, Lemnitzer felt free to lie to Congress. When asked, during secret hearings before a Senate committee, if he knew of any Pentagon plans for a direct invasion of Cuba he said he did not. Yet detailed JCS invasion plans had been drawn up even before Kennedy was inaugurated. And additional plans had been developed since. The consummate planner and man of details also became evasive, suddenly encountering great difficulty in recalling key aspects of the operation, as if he had been out of the country during the period. It was a sorry spectacle. Senator Gore called for Lemnitzer to be fired. "We need a shake up of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" he said. "We direly need a new chairman, as well as new members." No one had any idea of Operation Northwoods.

Because so many documents were destroyed, it is difficult to determine how many senior officials were aware of Operation Northwoods. As has been described, the document was signed and fully approved by Lemnitzer and the rest of the Joint Chiefs and addressed to the Secretary of Defense for his signature. Whether it went beyond McNamara to the president and the attorney general is not known.

Even after Lemnitzer lost his job, the Joint Chiefs kept planning "pretext" operations at least into 1963. Among their proposals was a deliberately create a war between Cuba and any of a number of .n American neighbors. This would give the United States military an excuse to come in on the side of Cuba's adversary and get rid of "A contrived 'Cuban' attack on an OAS [Organization of Americas] member could be set up," said one proposal, "and the attacked state could be urged to 'take measures of self-defense and request ice from the U.S. and OAS; the U.S. could almost certainly obtain necessary two-thirds support among OAS members for collective action against Cuba."

Among the nations they suggested that the United States secretly were Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. Both were members of the Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war Castro. The report noted, "Any of the contrived situations de above are inherently, extremely risky in our democratic system in which security can be maintained, after the fact, with very great difficulty. If the decision should be made to set up a contrived situation it be one in which participation by U.S. personnel is limited only to the most highly trusted covert personnel. This suggests the infeasibility of the use of military units for any aspect of the contrived situation."

The report even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for ration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo." The act suggested--bribing a foreign nation to launch a violent attack American military installation--was treason.

In May 1963, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze sent a the White House proposing "a possible scenario whereby an attack on a United States reconnaissance aircraft could be exploited toward the end of effecting the removal of the Castro regime." In the event Cuba attacked a U-2, the plan proposed sending in additional American pilots, this time on dangerous, unnecessary low-level reconnaissance missions with the expectation that they would also be shot down, thus provoking a war "[T]he U.S. could undertake various measures designed to stimulate the Cubans to provoke a new incident," said the plan. Nitze, however, did not volunteer to be one of the pilots.

One idea involved sending fighters across the island on "harassing reconnaissance" and "show-off" missions "flaunting our freedom of action, hoping to stir the Cuban military to action." "Thus," said the plan, "depending above all on whether the Cubans were or could be made to be trigger-happy, the development of the initial downing of a reconnaissance plane could lead at best to the elimination of Castro, perhaps to the removal of Soviet troops and the installation of ground inspection in Cuba, or at the least to our demonstration of firmness on reconnaissance." About a month later, a low-level flight was made across Cuba, but unfortunately for the Pentagon, instead of bullets it produced only a protest.

Lemnitzer was a dangerous-perhaps even unbalanced-right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.

In retrospect, the documents offer new insight into the thinking of the military's star-studded leadership. Although they never succeeded in launching America into a phony war with Cuba, they may have done so with Vietnam. More than 50,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese were eventually killed in that war.

It has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident-the spark that led to America's long war in Vietnam-was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement. Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf But defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior officials would never engage in such deceit.

Now, however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it at deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and "Cuba" with "North Vietnam" and the Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.

Book epigram:

"The public has a duty to watch its Government closely and keep it on the right track." --Lieutenant Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, USAF, Director, NSA, _NSA Newsletter_, June 1997

More at ...

http://larouchepub.com/other/2001/2839operation_northwds.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/bal-te.md.nsa24apr24.story

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2001/04/25/nsa

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662&page=1

Why can't Americans make things? Two words: business school.

2009-12-28T16:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.tnr.com/article/economy/wagoner-henderson

Upper Mismanagement
Why can't Americans make things? Two words: business school.
Noam Scheiber December 18, 2009 | 12:00 am

One of the themes that came up while I was profiling [1] White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them?

It’s not obvious that you would. Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that’s the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM’s top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his failed predecessor, Rick Wagoner, both worked their way up from the company’s vaunted Treasurer’s office.) But these executives were frequently numb to the sorts of innovations that enable high-quality production at low cost. As Khurana quips, “That’s how you end up with GM rather than Toyota.”

How did we get to this point? In some sense, it’s the result of broad historical and economic forces. Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.

After World War II, large corporations went on acquisition binges and turned themselves into massive conglomerates. In their landmark Harvard Business Review article from 1980, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” Robert Hayes and William Abernathy pointed out that the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and long-term* market share.

By the 1980s, the conglomerate boom was reversing itself. Investors began seizing control of overgrown public companies and breaking them up. But this task was, if anything, even more dependent on fluency in financial abstractions. The leveraged-buyout boom produced a whole generation of finance tycoons—the Michael Milkens of the world—whose ability to value corporate assets was far more important than their ability to run them.

The new managerial class tended to neglect process innovation because it was hard to justify in a quarterly earnings report, where metrics like “return on investment” reigned supreme. “In an era of management by the numbers, many American managers … are reluctant to invest heavily in the development of new manufacturing processes,” Hayes and Abernathy wrote. “Many of them have effectively forsworn long-term technological superiority as a competitive weapon.” By contrast, European and Japanese manufacturers, who lived and died on the strength of their exports, innovated relentlessly. One of Toyota’s most revolutionary production techniques is to locate suppliers inside its own factories. The New York Times’ Jon Gertner recently visited a Toyota plant and reported [2] that the company doesn’t actually order a seat for a new truck until the chassis hits the assembly line, at which point the seat is promptly built on-site and installed. “If the front seat had not been ordered 85 minutes earlier, it would not exist,” Gertner observed. Alas, these aren’t the kinds of money-saving breakthroughs the GM brain trust has ever excelled at.

The country’s business schools tended to reflect and reinforce these trends. By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to be overachiever types motivated primarily by salary rather than some lifelong ambition to run a steel mill. And there was a lot more money to be made in finance than manufacturing. A recent paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef shows that compensation in the finance sector began a sharp, upward trajectory around 1980.

The business schools had their own incentives to channel students into high-paying fields like finance, thanks to the rising importance of school rankings, which heavily weighted starting salaries. The career offices at places like Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago institutionalized the process—for example, by making it easier for Wall Street outfits and consulting firms to recruit on campus. A recent Harvard Business School case study about General Electric shows that the company had so much trouble competing for MBAs that it decided to woo top graduates from non-elite schools rather than settle for elite-school graduates in the bottom half or bottom quarter of their classes.

No surprise then that, over time, the faculty and curriculum at the Harvards and Stanfords of the world began to evolve. “If you look at the distribution of faculty at leading business schools,” says Khurana, “they’re mostly in finance. … Business schools are responsive to changes in the external environment.” Which meant that, even if a student aspired to become a top operations man (or woman) at a big industrial company, the infrastructure to teach him didn’t really exist.

In fairness, all that financial expertise we’ve been churning out hasn’t been a complete waste (much as it may seem that way today). Many of the financial restructurings of the ‘80s and ‘90s made the economy more efficient and competitive. Likewise, it would be ludicrous to suggest that simply changing the culture of business schools would single-handedly revive U.S. manufacturing. As I explained in the Ron Bloom piece, that sector faces a variety of challenges, not least the mercantilist industrial policies of our foreign competitors.

On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that American manufacturing has a chance of recovering unless business schools start producing people who can run industrial companies, not just buy and sell their assets. And we’re pretty far away from that point today.

The Big Zero

2009-12-28T16:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html

December 28, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Big Zero
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Maybe we knew, at some unconscious, instinctive level, that it would be an era best forgotten. Whatever the reason, we got through the first decade of the new millennium without ever agreeing on what to call it. The aughts? The naughties? Whatever. (Yes, I know that strictly speaking the millennium didn’t begin until 2001. Do we really care?)

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. 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.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.

So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.

For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America’s business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in the world — knew what we were doing.

Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration’s top economist), gave in 1999. “If you ask why the American financial system succeeds,” he said, “at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities.” And he went on to declare that there is “an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does.”

So here’s what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.

What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.

What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.

Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.

Then there are the politicians. Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.

So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

Northwest Bomb Plot 'Oddities'

2009-12-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.legitgov.org/northwest_bomb_plot_oddities.html

Northwest Bomb Plot 'Oddities'
Lori Price
legitgov.org
Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:30 EST

In 2008, the ACLU estimated the US 'No Fly List' to have grown to over 1,000,000 names -- heck, even Cat Stevens and the late Senator Ted Kennedy were on it -- and it continues to expand. But, suspected terrorist Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was curiously able to obtain military-grade high explosives --80 grams of PETN (Gee, where'd he get that?) -- managed to escape airport security and detonate his underwear bomb!

In April 2009, American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board. Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia, figured on the US authorities' 'no-fly list.' Air France said the April 18 flight was forced to divert to the French Caribbean island of Martinique before continuing its journey (telegraph.co.uk).

Got it? Write a book critical of the CIA -- you cannot fly. Carry explosives (allegedly from Yemen) on board when the US is trolling for an excuse to invade and occupy Yemen for its oil -- yes you can! The US needs false flags to provide cover for illegal invasions and occupations. The 9/11 terrorist attacks (aka inside job, six ways to Sunday) worked well for the US government; the security-industrial complex made billions and US corporaterrorists were able to negotiate the wholesale theft of Iraq's oil.

According to CNN, the terror suspect's father tried to warn authorities. CNN reported: The father of a man suspected in a botched terror attack aboard a Northwest Airlines flight contacted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria recently with concerns his son was planning something, a senior U.S. administration official said Saturday. The father -- identified by a family source as Umaru Abdul Mutallab -- contacted the U.S. Embassy "a few weeks ago" saying his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had "become radicalized," the senior administration official, who is familiar with the case, told CNN.

And yet, Abdulmutallab was not obliged to undergo any additional airport screening layers, prior to boarding the last leg of his journey to Detroit.

Abdulmutallab was thwarted by a quote, unquote vacationing movie producer, Jasper Schuringa, who, within seconds, asserted that he not only tackled the suspect and put him in a headlock but also tried 'to search his body for any explosives' (CNN). Unless one was a bona-fide law enforcement professional or a military agent, who on earth would think of searching a man who had set himself on fire in a matter of seconds, for more explosives?

The goal is Yemeni oil. Hence the reason for the destabilization and the purported need for the US to stop al-Qaeda (literally, 'the database'). The Yemeni national security chief has declared that the country is receiving assistance from the US in the crackdown on what he called 'al-Qaeda operatives' in southern Yemen (Press TV). Translation: US corporaterrorists want Yemeni oil and they want it NOW.

Investigators: Northwest Bomb Plot Planned by al-Qaeda in Yemen --Officials Say Bomb Materials Sewn Into Suspect's Underwear by Top Terror Bomb Maker 26 Dec 2009 The plot to blow up an American passenger jet over Detroit was organized and launched by al-Qaeda [al-CIAduh] leaders in Yemen who apparently sewed bomb materials into the suspect's underwear before sending him on his mission, federal authorities tell ABC News. Investigators say the suspect had more than 80 grams of PETN, a compound related to nitro-glycerin used by the military. The so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, had only about 50 grams kin his failed attempt in 2001 to blow up a U.S.-bound jet.

Source: Terror suspect's father tried to warn authorities 27 Dec 2009 The father of a man suspected in a botched terror attack aboard a Northwest Airlines flight contacted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria recently with concerns his son was planning something, a senior U.S. administration official said Saturday. The father -- identified by a family source as Umaru Abdul Mutallab -- contacted the U.S. Embassy "a few weeks ago" saying his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had "become radicalized," the senior administration official, who is familiar with the case, told CNN. Abdulmutallab, 23, was charged in a federal criminal complaint Saturday with attempting to destroy the plane Friday on its final approach to Michigan's Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and placing a destructive device on the aircraft, the Department of Justice said.

Father alerted US about Nigerian plane bomb suspect 27 Dec 2009 The father of a Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a transatlantic jet on Christmas Day had voiced concerns to US officials about his son. The father, a top Nigerian banker, warned US authorities last month about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's extreme views, say officials. US sources confirm a file was opened, but say the information did not warrant placing the accused on a "no-fly" list.

Airline bomber was barred from Britain --Man who allegedly attempted to blow up US jet had UK visa request refused in May 27 Dec 2009 The son of a prominent Nigerian banker, who allegedly attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight over America, was barred from returning to Britain earlier this year. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, graduated from a university in London last year but his visa request was refused in May when he attempted to apply for a new course at a bogus college. Abdulmutallab, described as a devout Muslim, attempted to ignite an explosive device on a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day after shouting about Afghanistan.

Unclear If Suspect's Name Was On Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment List --The list, maintained by United States National Counterterrorism Center, includes about 550,000 names 27 Dec 2009 The Nigerian man accused of trying to ignite an incendiary device aboard a trans-Atlantic jetliner on Friday came to the attention of American officials at least "several weeks ago," but the initial information was not specific enough to raise alarms that he could potentially carry out a terrorist attack, a senior Obama administration official said on Saturday... It was unclear whether Mr. Abdulmutallab's name was entered into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, which includes people with known or suspected contact or ties to a terrorist or terrorist organization. Those people, however, are not necessarily placed on the federal government's so-called no-fly list, which prohibits persons entering the United States because of known or suspected [or imagined] terrorists links. Mr. Abdulmutallab was not on that list, federal officials say.

US authorites divert Air France flight carrying 'no-fly' journalist to Mexico--American authorities reportedly refused an Air France flight from Paris to Mexico entry into US airspace because a left-wing journalist writing a book on the CIA was on board. 29 Apr 2009 Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for Le Monde Diplomatique and has written on revolutionary movements in Cuba and Colombia , figured on the US authorities' "no-fly list". Air France said the April 18 flight was forced to divert to the French Caribbean island of Martinique before continuing its journey and that it might ask the US Transportation Security Administration for compensation. A spokesman for Mr Ospina's French publisher, Le Temps des Cerises, said: "Hernando, who was heading to Nicaragua to research a report, thus found out that he is on a 'no-fly list' that bans a number of people from flying to or even over the United States." Some 50,000 people are said to be on the list set up under George W. Bush, the former US president [sic]. The publisher accused the Central Intelligence Agency of being behind Mr Ospina's blacklisting, pointing out that the journalist was currently researching a book about the spy agency. "It shows to what degree its paranoia (has reached)," it said. 'I was trying to search his body for any explosives.'

Passenger says he helped thwart terror attack 27 Dec 2009 Passenger Jasper Schuringa told CNN that with the aid of the cabin crew, he helped subdue and isolate Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was charged Saturday with trying to destroy a plane. Schuringa of Amsterdam, Netherlands, said he was traveling to Florida to visit friends. The journey aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 had been mundane, he said. But as the plane neared its destination of Detroit, Michigan, he heard a pop that sounded like a firecracker going off, and someone started yelling: "Fire! Fire!" Then, there was smoke. "Around 30 seconds later the smoke started to fill up on the left side beneath this person," he said. That's when Schuringa said he knew something was wrong. "I basically reacted directly. I didn't think. When you hear a pop on the plane you're awake, trust me," Schuringa said. When he noticed that Abdulmutallab was not moving, he grew suspicious. "I was on the right side of the plane and the suspect was on the left side, there were quite some seats in between." He jumped over the passenger next to him and lunged over Abdulmutallab's seat, "Because I was thinking he's trying to blow up the plane, and I was trying to search his body for any explosives."

Airports intensify security measures worldwide in wake of failed bomb attack aboard U.S.-bound jetliner --Terror suspect charged in jetliner bomb plot 26 Dec 2009 Federal authorities have charged Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, of Nigeria, with attempting to destroy Northwest flight 253 with a "destructive device" as it descended into Detroit on Christmas Day. In a case of attempted terrorism that has sparked a worldwide intensification of security at airports, U.S. officials said Saturday afternoon that a preliminary FBI analysis found a bomb-making chemical called PETN in the device Abdulmutallab tried to detonate. The affidavit, filed in the Eastern District of Michigan, also said FBI agents discovered the remnant of a syringe near the suspect's seat, part of what the agents believe was part of the explosive device.

US bombs Sa'ada governor's house, Houthis say 27 Dec 2009 A US fighter jet has carried out multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen's northern rugged province of Sa'ada, Houthi fighters say. The Yemen-based Houthi fighters say the warplane struck the home owned by the governor of Sa'ada province, Hassan Mohammad Manna in five blitzes. There were no reports on possible casualties in the attacks.

Yemen confirms receiving US military support 27 Dec 2009 The Yemeni national security chief has declared that the country is receiving assistance from the US in the crackdown on what he called 'al-Qaeda operatives' in southern Yemen. Mohamed al-Anisi has told the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz that Yemeni forces were cooperating with the US military on attacks against al-Qaeda camps, DPA reported on Saturday. Yemen's confirmation comes as an ABC report revealed that US President Barack Obama had signed the order for a recent military strike on Yemen in which scores of civilians, including children, were killed.

Yemen oil min- oil majors mull investments-paper 21 Feb 2009 Yemen has received investment offers from oil majors including Exxon Mobil Corp and Total, Oil Minister Amir al-Aidarous said in remarks published on Saturday. Yemen's Ministry for Oil and Mineral Resources has received eight oil investment bids from international companies, pan-Arab daily al-Hayat quoted Aidarous as saying, four of which were from oil majors seeking direct negotiations with Yemen. The companies include Exxon Mobil, Total, and BP, the minister said, but did not elaborate on the nature of the investments. Other companies that made bids included Austrian oil and gas group OMV, Nexen, and Occidental, he said.

Police lose battle over evidence of 'British 9/11' plot--Scotland Yard must reveal whether it had CIA intelligence26 Dec 2009 Scotland Yard has been ordered to reveal whether it has any evidence to support America's claim that Britain was saved from a 9/11-style disaster by the CIA's secret foreign interrogation centres. The Times has won a case under the Freedom of Information Act forcing British police to say whether the US stopped a plot to fly planes into Canary Wharf and Heathrow. The claim was made by President [sic] Bush when he first acknowledged the existence of a clandestine CIA prison network created to fight his War on of Terror. Scotland Yard has been given 35 days to comply or appeal.If it admits that there is no such intelligence, it would undermine any political defence for America's strong-arm tactics in fighting terrorism.

Beyond the Darkest Hours, Grassroots Rising

2009-12-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

One note: the world is cooling, not warming so we need carbon to try to prevent an ice age.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/26-0

December 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Beyond the Darkest Hours, Grassroots Rising
by Ronnie Cummins

Winter in America 2009. Passing through the darkest period of the winter solstice, shrouded by the gloom and doom of climate destruction, war, and economic depression, making our way around the broken promises of "change we can believe in," we nonetheless find ourselves celebrating life and the redemptive power of a global grassroots revolution. In the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen Climate conference, and the "business as usual" insanity of Obama and the governing elite, millions of us are terminally fed up and fired up for action.

A critical mass of food and farm activists, North and South, are becoming aware that the second decade of the 21st Century likely marks the end of the road for chemical, energy, and water-intensive food and agriculture. And, as the energy, climate, and economic crises converge, a growing corps of climate activists understand that we are witnessing the beginning of the end for fossil fuel-based industry and transportation, energy-intensive housing and suburban sprawl, and a "profit-at-any-cost" economy based upon over-consumption, war, and commercial conquest.

As the winter of discontent turns, it's time to bury our illusions and prepare for the battle of our lives. As the Director of the Organic Consumers Association, I invite you to join us on the organic road, the Via Organica, as we struggle to dismantle the old system and rebuild the new, starting with our local households, communities, and regions. You can sign up for our newsletter at: .

Beyond the Darkest Days

Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

In 2009, indentured politicians, bought and sold by the corporate elite, crushed our hopes for peace and prosperity by spending trillions of our tax dollars on war, Wall Street, and corporate welfare. As a critical mass now understand, these trillions could and should have gone toward financing organic transitions, public health, and a Green New Deal. Given the fact that just over a year ago we drove the warmongers and corporate criminals of the Bush Administration out of office, and replaced them with a new set of so-called liberal Democrats, we should already be well on our way to changing course, averting economic meltdown and climate catastrophe. Instead Obama and his pompous cohorts have disillusioned an entire generation and stabbed the living Earth in the back. Riding on a Death Train full-throttle toward the abyss, it matters little whether the Commander in Chief is an outright fascist, like Bush, or merely a coward and a fraud, like Obama. Circumstances leave us no choice but to organize a mutiny and stop the Death Train.

Will We Survive the Climate Crisis?

World leaders abandoned the UN climate talks in Copenhagen without a binding agreement to reduce the threat of deadly greenhouse gases. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere, compounded by an excess of methane (from factory farms and rotting garbage) and nitrous oxide (from chemical fertilizers) already exceeds the dangerous tipping point of 350 parts per million (ppm). We're currently at 387ppm. Even if we are able to reduce CO2 to 350ppm, we will still experience a 2.7 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature by 2100, making life on the planet difficult, but still possible.

If we continue with business as usual, in 2100 the level will be 965ppm CO2 (+ 8.6 F). If the world acts on proposals for CO2 reduction confirmed in Copenhagen, in 2100 the level will be 770ppm CO2 (+ 7 F). That's the best-case scenario right now, a seven degree Fahrenheit average temperature rise, which some predict could come as early as 2060, in time for you or your children to experience Climate Hell first-hand. Unless we reverse global warming, the Earth, which is expected to have nine billion people in 2050, will have a carrying capacity for only one billion. This means billions will die.

If it's hard for you to imagine what life might be like as sea levels rise, droughts and floods become ever more common, crop failure becomes routine, the world's forests burn, glacier-fed rivers dry up, and a quarter of the planet's mammals go extinct, read this terrifying short story, "Diary of an Interesting Year."

Global Warming: An Organic Future, or No Future

One way or another, either planned or through necessity, humanity will return to organic and traditional agriculture, because it is the only farming system that can supply the world with sufficient quantities of healthy food in the emerging era of global warming, erratic weather, declining fossil fuels, and water scarcity. There is no other way.

In 2009, the Organic Consumers Association spent a good part of our efforts focusing on the connection between global warming and industrial agriculture and the promise of organic agriculture to mitigate and reverse climate change by:

1) Drastically reducing the global industrialized food system's 44-57% share of global greenhouse gas emissions (CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide) and 2) Sequestering billions of tons of CO2 in the soil.

If we convert the world's 3.5 billion acres of farmland to organic, we can sequester 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil, where it belongs. If we also organically manage most of the world's 11 billion acres of pastures, rangelands, and forests we can potentially sequester 100% of greenhouse gas emissions. This long-term process of organic transition will buy us the time to reduce fossil fuel use by 90% and retrofit our economy, transportation, and housing to renewable, clean energy.

Organic Transitions: Taking on the Fertilizer, Garbage and Sludge Industries

Why is there so much carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere and not enough carbon organic matter in the soil? Corporate agribusiness, industrial forestry, the garbage and sewage industry and agricultural biotechnology have literally killed the climate stabilizing, carbon sink capacity of the Earth's living soil. Industrial agriculture and forestry have eroded and depleted the soil food web, annihilating soil microorganisms and destroying plants, trees, and soil's natural capacity to clean the atmosphere and sequester CO2. This climate-disrupting ecocide is a direct result of the suicidal use of billions of pounds of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, soil destroying pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, insecticidal GMO crops, factory farm waste, and toxic sewage sludge--instead of feeding the soil and maintaining soil vitality (and its ability to sequester carbon) with organic compost and fertilizers and cover crops. In 2010 OCA and our allies will begin to expose this deadly chemical and GMO attack on the planet's soil food web and make genuine certified organic fertilizer and compost the norm, rather than just the green alternative.

In the US, we throw away, as food waste, 40% of all of our food each year. Production of that wasted food accounts for more than one-quarter of the US's total annual freshwater consumption and equates to 300 million barrels of oil. Even worse, this enormous volume of non-composted food waste rotting in landfills emits tremendous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 20-70 times more damaging than C02.

In the U.S. today about 80 gallons of water per day per person is flushed or dumped down the drain into our vast and ill-designed sewage system, much of it being valuable potable water flushed down the toilet. In the sewage or wastewater stream, this household sewage (unfortunately, in most households, already carrying toxic chemicals from non-organic body care, home cleaning products and pharmaceutical drugs) is mixed with hospital and industrial toxins and pathogens, pharmaceuticals, street storm water run-off and chemical lawn and farm run-off as it enters into the so-called "sewage treatment" plant. After nominal "treatment" this wastewater is sent downstream for the next community to chemically treat it and declare it "safe," while billions of pounds of toxic sludge are left behind.

Instead of isolating and containing America's toxic sewage sludge as hazardous waste--which is what it is--industry and city governments save money by renaming this toxic sludge "biosolids" and spreading it on non-organic farms (and backyard gardens and public lands) across the country. One of the most outrageous practices is the sale (in garden supply stores) or giveaway (to schools and backyard gardeners) of toxic sewage sludge as "organic fertilizer" or "organic compost."

The EPA has aided and abetted this hazardous practice for several decades by claiming that the toxic chemical poisons, heavy metals, pathogens, hormone disruptors, pesticides, and pharmaceutical drug residues routinely contained in sewage sludge are diluted to "acceptable levels." In 1998, the Organic Consumers Association and the organic community successfully fought to keep toxic sewage sludge out of national organic standards, but we now need to ban sewage sludge on non-organic farms (and all land applications) as well.

In the organic future, valuable organic matter in the waste stream will neither be wasted nor mixed with other garbage or toxins. It will be separated at the source, at homes and businesses, mixed with animal manures and green wastes in a central location, and made into valuable organic compost (natural fertilizer or food for the soil). This organic compost can then be supplied to organic and transition-to-organic farms, backyard gardens, lawns, and other land use applications. This is the only way we can eliminate the two billion pounds of chemical fertilizers applied to non-organic farms every year in the U.S. Nitrate fertilizers (banned in organic production) contaminate the atmosphere, kill the soil, and destabilize the climate with nitrous oxide. Moreover chemical fertilizers pollute city tap water and kill fish and marine life, creating hundreds of massive "dead zones" in the oceans.

Zero waste recycling and the creation of an abundant, affordable supply of organic compost is an essential part of our organic future. This means taking apart the profit at any cost garbage industry and the toxic sewage sludge cartel.

The High Costs of So-Called Cheap Food

Over the past 65 years, chemical agriculture, factory farms, and now genetic engineering have devastated public health, wrecked the environment, and destabilized the climate. The U.S. public now spends $2.4 trillion dollars a year on health care, $800 billion of which is directly attributable to consuming chemical-laden, nutritionally deficient processed food.

In only 15 years unregulated and unlabeled genetically engineered foods and crops (GMOs) have been planted on millions of acres of farm land. These GM crops are planted on soil which is then repeatedly doused with toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers. GMO corn, cotton, canola and soy are currently laced into 80% of (non-organic) supermarket foods and restaurant items. The bodies of the majority of American adults and children are bloated and contaminated with so-called agricultural commodities: high fructose corn syrup, derived from GMO corn, trans-fats (GMO cotton, canola and soy oil), and meat and dairy foods derived from factory farmed animals fed and reared on GMOs and pesticide-tainted grains, antibiotics, hormones, and slaughterhouse waste.

As a direct result of chemical and GMO agriculture, most American consumers are ill-fed and disease-prone.

Overall, U.S. diet-related diseases cause an estimated 580,000 deaths every year.

* OBESITY. In the U.S. nearly 100 million people are seriously and dangerously overweight. Obesity kills thousands and costs taxpayers and employers $147 billion annually.

* HEART DISEASE. In 2010, heart disease will kill hundreds of thousands (in 2006, 831,272 people died of cardiovascular disease) which costs the US $503 billion.

* DIABETES. The number of people with diabetes in the US is expected to increase from 23.7 million to 44.1 million in the next 25 years. The cost of treating diabetes is expected to triple in that time from $113 billion per year to $336 billion per year.

* CANCER. Cancer has reached epidemic proportions, with 48% of men and 38% of women now stricken during their lifetimes. 35% percent of cancers are diet related. Diet-related cancers now out-pace smoking-related cancers (30% are smoking related).

* FOOD POISONING. The U.S. industrial, factory farm food system is responsible for 76 million cases of food-poisoning reported every year that result in over 300,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. Food poisoning costs are substantial, estimated at up to $22 billion each year.

* ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE. In part because of the routine overuse of antibiotics on factory farms - in the US, animals consume 70% of the antibiotics - more than 63,000 people die in the US each year from hospital-acquired infections resistant to at least one antibiotic. This financial costs of this public health emergency are up to $5 billion dollars a year.

In 2007 over $2.2 trillion was spent on health care in the US.

After poisoning us with cheap food and destroying the environment, Big Food Inc. turns us over to Big Pharma and the Industrial Health Complex to repair the damage, or rather to keep us alive long enough to extract maximum profits. But from the warped perspective of the for-profit health insurance industry, overweight and diseased people aren't very profitable. That's why health insurance corporations spend $350 billion per year trying to avoid coverage and deny claims. The vast, paper-pushing bureaucracy the for-profit insurance industry has created to help them avoid providing services soaks up 31% of all health care spending!

If we shifted the 31% of health care spending taken up by the administrative costs of the for-profit health insurance industry to a single-payer, universal health care system, we could cover the uninsured without increasing total health-care spending. The Organic Consumers Association supports single-payer, universal health care, with a focus on preventive health, diet, nutrition and stress-reduction.

However:

IF PRESIDENT OBAMA SIGNS A BILL THAT TAKES AWAY OUR HEALTH RIGHTS, THAT FORCES AMERICANS TO BUY OVERPRICED, INADEQUATE COVERAGE FROM THE FOR-PROFIT HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY, OCA WILL LAUNCH A BOYCOTT!

Forced health insurance is not health care reform, it's corporate welfare and it is a direct result of the nearly one billion dollars that the health care industry is projected to have spent to lobby and bribe the politicians who voted for the bill.

Not only does the for-profit health insurance industry spend 31 cents of every health insurance dollar pushing paper and avoiding claims, but the for-profit "health" system has become almost as deadly as the chemical and GMO food and farming system. Medical malpractice kills as many as 98,000 people in hospitals every year. Another 300,000 people are injured due to medical errors.

Pharmaceuticals are even more dangerous than medical malpractice:

More than 50 percent of all drugs have serious adverse reactions that are discovered only after the drugs have entered the market (e.g., they are not detected during pre-market testing) - making us all unwitting guinea pigs. About 2,270,000 patients per year incur hospital costs as a result of adverse drug reactions.

Another 4,300,000 visit other health care providers (physicians, hospital outpatient departments and emergency rooms) as a result of adverse drug reactions.

Approximately 230,000 die each year as a result of an adverse drug reaction (105,000 using drugs as directed and 125,000 as a result of mistakes). This is the third leading cause of death in the United States.

The total annual health care costs as a consequence of adverse drug reactions exceeds a staggering $200 billion - an amount equal to what is spent on Medicaid every year and almost half of what is spent on Medicare. Reforming our health care system is literally a matter of life or death.

Eventually, we have to stop arguing over who's going to pay for out-of-control health care costs and restore public health! The real solution to our health care crisis is to stop subsidizing chemical and GMO food and farming, along with the destruction of our environment and our climate, and make the long overdue transition to organics. Then, under universal health care or Medicare for All, we can shift from health care that treats sickness caused by unhealthy food and an unhealthy environment and lifestyle to holistic health care that promotes wellness.

Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Pockets of White America Are in the Throes of an Existential Crisis

2009-12-26T16:53:00.001-08:00

Pockets of White America Are in the Throes of an Existential Crisis
By Rich Benjamin, AlterNet
December 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144672/

The headlines snared my attention over the last several days. "White Americans' Majority to End By Mid-century," announces The Associated Press. "Projections Put Whites in Minority in U.S. by 2050," declares The New York Times.

The Census Bureau has been churning some provocative press releases between its last head count (2000) and the one next year. Why, I wonder, the palpable anxiety? And why don't these headlines announce a positive reading of this statistic? Why not: "By 2050, People of Color Will Be a Majority"?

Already, 40 percent of Americans under the age of twenty-four are not white. Between now and 2050, the Latino population is projected to triple, the Asian population to double, and the non-Hispanic white population to flatline.

Meanwhile this week, two white police officers in Shenandoah, PA were indicted in federal court for filing false reports about the beating death of Luis Ramirez, a 25-year old undocumented worker. (When the immigrant was murdered in 2008 in the Pennsylvania hamlet, one of police officers was dating the accused teenage assailant's mother.) And the Justice Department announced this week that federal hate crimes cases are at their highest level since 2001.

"Do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, of which you're a part, and so am I," said Bill O'Reilly to John McCain in 2007, complaining about the number of undocumented Latino immigrants. "They hate America, and they hate it because it's run primarily by white, Christian men. They want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have."

Sealing the Mexican border would not significantly disrupt the Latino population increase. Nor does a sour economy. Domestic births currently outpace immigration as the key source of Latino population growth. In bellwether California, for example, births to Latina mothers outnumber births to all other races combined.

Racial demographics singe my thinking like a slow-burn fuse. When exactly did I grasp white people's proportional population decline? When, at last, did I realize what explosive emotions Latino immigration triggers? Was it reflecting on the many Census-related headlines, or while noticing other media's metaphors for Latino immigration ("flood," "tidal wave," "overrun," "invasion"), metaphors firmly in the vernacular of catastrophe, the idiom of natural disaster?

Was it absorbing all the reports in March of 2001 that announced black Americans' declining population share, a news flash that hit me more like an eviction notice. Hey, effective immediately, the Hispanics have ousted the blacks as America's largest minority! Or was it watching deposed Alarm King Lou Dobbs's "Broken Borders" segments, or clicking through the competing doomsday scenarios on cable TV, or noticing the spate of panicky best sellers, like Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, Patrick Buchanan's State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, and Samuel Huntington's Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's Identity. I can't put my finger on any moment, no. It has been a ten-year drumbeat, a rat-tat-tat, of quickening alarms alerting drastic, unprecedented cultural changes to our nation, complete with compression intervals.

By 2050, White People Will No Longer Be the Majority. The next census is being conducted against this backdrop, what I call "The White People Deadline."

Our country's Obama-era racial politics rarely mentions race in debate, though it lodges race just under the surface of "nonracial" issues: taxes, health care reform, immigration, public spending. There is a slim silver lining to the economic slump: It may inspire a greater commitment toward our nation's common good and more confidence in the public sector. For too long, an anti-government, race-tinged mindset has corroded belief in "one nation for all," while fertilizing conservative myths that "explain" the economic meltdown and rebuke President Obama's recovery agenda: "too much government regulation," "high taxes," "wasteful spending," and "undeserving welfare recipients."

Tea party protests. Combusting town-hall forums. A nativist Birther movement. Rising hate crimes against Latino Americans and immigrants. "You lie!" Right-wing calls to boycott the 2010 Census. Pockets of white America are suffering an existential crisis.

As the Census "time bomb" ticks, fear mounts over a perceived loss of whites' raw power - demographic, social, economic, and political.

Rich Benjamin is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.

Can We Rescue the Republic Before the Dark Politics Take Over?

2009-12-26T11:31:00.000-08:00

Can We Rescue the Republic Before the Dark Politics Take Over?
By Kirk Nielsen, Miller-McCune.com
December 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144809/

Did America slip into a semiliterate, polarized, pre-fascist state over the past decade or so, allowing greedy oligarchs and corporate elites to run the government? Two books I recently read offer reasonably persuasive evidence and arguments that the country did, and a third suggests that dictatorial mindsets could besiege Americans, with an assist from the Internet, if they don't come to their more deliberative senses. Each of the books offers an informed diagnosis of the dangers that widespread ignorance and ideological polarization pose for American democracy, though none offers a comprehensive treatment for the malaise.

I read the three books in less than two weeks; friends ask how that was possible. The trick is to avoid not only Facebook and Twitter but also: celebrity news, cable news, Oprah, Jerry Springer, American Idol, The Swan, other reality-TV shows, professional wrestling, violent pornography, positive psychology and right-wing Christian fundamentalism.

The latter list includes some of the spectacularly mind-numbing American pursuits that Chris Hedges examines in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Hedges submits that while they mesmerized large portions of the American citizenry, CEOs being paid millions of dollars a year to run companies that feed on taxpayer money usurped our government — with the help of elected officials bought by campaign contributions and tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists who now write many of the nation's laws.

"Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports," Hedges writes. "The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. ... Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification."

Of course, they did not get into this clueless state by themselves. They were manipulated by "agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion," Hedges continues. "They are the puppet masters. ... The techniques of theater have leeched into politics, religion, education, literature, news, commerce, warfare, and crime."

I know those fools are out there — many millions of them. I might even be one. But what is absolutely maddening about this book is Hedges' penchant for stating sweeping, generalized claims as absolutes. And yet this master of divinity turned New York Times war correspondent become sociological scholar often bolsters his summations with just enough research, statistical data and anecdotal evidence to make them plausible. The book takes readers to Madison Square Garden for an exegesis of professional wrestling; to the Adult Video News Expo in Las Vegas for lengthy interviews with porn actors and producers and an inflatable doll vendor; and to Claremont Graduate University in California for a seminar on positive psychology, which Hedges terms a "quack science" that "is to the corporate state what eugenics was for the Nazis."

As a resident of Miami Beach, where the pornographic sensibility is a way of life, I wasn't shocked to read that annual porn sales in the United States "are estimated at $10 billion or higher" or that DIRECTV distributes "more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month." But I shuddered when Hedges documented not just a growing appetite for violent forms of porn in America but their remarkable visual similarity to photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. "Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society," he writes. "The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy. ... The Abu Ghraib images that were released, and the hundreds more disturbing images that remain classified, could be stills from porn films."

Unfortunately, Empire of Illusion won't enlighten or offend the large swaths of functionally illiterate Americans transfixed by smut, pro wrestling, reality TV or celebrity gossip, because those people won't read the book. But this scholarly 193-page diatribe, which draws from a 100-author bibliography ranging from the late neo-Marxist Frankfurt School icon Theodor Adorno (The Culture Industry) to Princeton professor emeritus Sheldon Wolin (Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism), would surely madden many proud affiliates and alumni of America's elite university system.

Hedges, who attended New England prep schools, Colgate and Harvard as a young man, and later taught at Princeton, Columbia and New York University, asserts in Chapter 3, "The Illusion of Wisdom," that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most elite schools "do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think." Elite universities are in the business of producing "hordes of competent systems managers" not critical thinkers. Those statements strike me as generally accurate. But I'd expect some fierce academic blowback from this notion: "The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive." And Hedges suggests that these high-end schools "refuse to question a self-justifying system" in which "organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter."

Hedges not only blames the elite universities for our mortgage-fueled financial crisis but is sure their alumni on Wall Street and in Washington have no capacity to really fix the economic system. "Indeed, they'll make it worse," he predicts, exchanging his reportorial register for the absolutist. "They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one." (He includes George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Obama's "degree-laden" cabinet members in this group.)

If Hedges knows how to fix the system, he doesn't tell us in Empire of Illusion. I hope that'll be the subject of his next book, because in the meantime, "powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing their influence and wealth" are waiting for "a national crisis that will allow them, in the name of national security and moral renewal, to take complete control," he warns, without citing verifiable evidence for his dire prediction.

What if PBS, Fox and YouTube organized a national debate featuring Chris Hedges, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, his predecessor Hank Paulson, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Christian Coalition president Roberta Combs and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid? That panel is a little far-fetched, but it's the sort of cross-ideological forum that Cass Sunstein prescribes in Republic.com 2.0 as a way of preventing the nation from sliding into factional, perhaps even violent strife.

Sunstein is a law professor, author and perennial all-star in the world of public intellectuals; he took leave from Harvard Law School to be administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at President Obama's Office of Management and Budget. "The American constitutional order was designed to create a republic, as opposed to a monarch or direct democracy," he writes. "Representatives would be accountable to the public at large. But there was also supposed to be a large degree of reflection and debate, both within the citizenry and within government itself."

Of course, the Founding Fathers knew public debate could get ugly. Sunstein notes Alexander Hamilton's belief that the "jarring of parties" was a good thing because it would engender deliberation and, over time, a "republic of reasons."

Are we one today? Not as much as we could be, Sunstein thinks. His fundamental concern in Republic.com 2.0 is the Internet's potential for impeding deliberation between groups with opposing viewpoints, eventually increasing ideological rigidity and polarization to a point of no return. It's vastly easier to join like-minded Internet "enclaves" across the world than to drive across town for a meeting in which someone might challenge one's pre-established beliefs and positions. Sunstein walks readers through behavioral studies finding that when groups of like-minded individuals are isolated from different viewpoints, they tend toward consensus on the most extreme position held within the group.

At worst, Sunstein says, Internet-induced polarization could lead to social instability. "The danger is that through the mechanisms of persuasive arguments, social comparisons, and corroboration, members will move to positions that lack merit," he writes. "It is impossible to say, in the abstract, that those who sort themselves into enclaves will generally move in a direction that is desirable for society at large or even for its own members. It is easy to think of examples to the contrary, as, for example, Nazism, hate groups, terrorists, and cults of various sorts."

Clearly, the Internet has potential to create political good. Citizens have access to vast amounts of information and commentary. Even like-minded enclave proliferation can be good: The more there are, the greater the potential for inter-enclave discussion.

But a study of 1,400 liberal and conservative blogs found the vast majority of bloggers link only to like-minded blogs. Worse, another study showed that when "liberal" bloggers comment on "conservative" blog posts, and vice-versa, a plurality of comments simply cast contempt on opposing views. "Only a quarter of cross-ideological posts involve genuine substantive discussion. In this way, real deliberation is often occurring within established points of view, but only infrequently across them," Sunstein reports.

One cure for Internet-driven polarization lies with "general interest intermediaries." By that terminology, Sunstein means media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, current affairs magazines, PBS, NPR and old-fashioned network news broadcasts: "People who rely on such intermediaries have a range of chance encounters, involving shared experiences with diverse others, and also exposure to materials and topics that they did not seek out in advance."

Of course, these are the media that are in decline because of the Internet. Sunstein imagines a greater role for private and public institutions, including the federal government, in ensuring enough general-interest intermediaries exist to make the republic's communications system "a help rather than a hindrance to democratic self-government" and a counterbalance to the echo chambers of the Web.

For the most part, Thom Hartmann's Threshold: Crisis of Western Civilization functions as a general-interest intermediary in book form. Still, readers can be forgiven for wondering, at times, whether they are in a no-conservatives zone. Hartmann is host of the Thom Hartmann Show, a nationally syndicated "progressive" radio talk show.

Just the same, Threshold is so geographically and temporally sprawling that it offers material even progressive readers might not have chosen in advance: a refugee camp in contemporary Darfur in southern Sudan (Lesson: Famine leads to war and more suffering.); ancient New Zealand, where the Maoris exterminated the moa birds, forcing them to become cannibals (Don't repeat this mistake.); contemporary Denmark, where people happily send 30 to 60 percent of their income to the government in exchange for free health care, free university tuition, yearlong maternity leave, ample unemployment coverage and more (Americans should consider this.); Caral in ancient Peru, where anthropologists have found no evidence of weaponry ("Maybe peace is the natural state of things."); the Iroquois people, who made certain decisions based on how they would affect tribe members seven generations hence. (If only the rest of us Americans would do that.)

In sum, Threshold is 262 pages of scientific and historical anecdote suggesting that unregulated markets, undemocratic behavior and unecological practices lead to catastrophe. If you haven't already read a good overview of topsoil depletion, the marine fisheries crisis, rain forest destruction, the democratic behavior of red deer, the 1888 Supreme Court decision that defined corporations as "persons," the $15 million that 30,000 corporate lobbyists spend weekly when Congress is in session, President Eisenhower's premonition of a military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence," the 2004 computerized voting machines controversy, the $1 trillion in tax dollars the U.S. government spent on war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not on infrastructure and schools, and the subprime loan/toxic securities debacle — you can find one in Threshold. Hartmann's common-sense remedies include "recovering a culture of democracy," "balancing the power of men and women," "reuniting with nature," "creating an economy modeled on biology" and "influencing people by helping them rather than bombing them." His book offers few specifics on how these ends might be accomplished in the real world.

So are we drifting along in a pre-fascist state? Has our democratic system really fallen under the control of corporate America? Hartmann's take obviously starts and stays (far) to the left of center, and we'll just have to stay tuned and see whether future events support the dire view he and Hedges have of America's political direction. Meanwhile, I'll be on the lookout for a persuasive book telling me how it isn't exactly so, and why America can escape from the economic and ecological spectacle it has made itself.

Kirk Nielsen is an independent journalist based in Miami Beach. HIs articles have also appeared in Salon, The Progressive, The Village Voice, and Poder magazine.

The Bogus Myth of Ronald Reagan

2009-12-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Upstaged-by-a-Chimp-The-B-by-John-Blumenthal-091223-770.html

December 23, 2009
Upstaged by a Chimp: The Bogus Myth of Ronald Reagan
By John Blumenthal

Why are Republicans still blathering on about Ronald Reagan with the kind of holy reverence that any non-delusional person would reserve for Moses?

It especially galls me when pundits keep uttering this one particularly unnerving mantra: "So-and-so is taking a page from Reagan's playbook.
The whole notion of the "playbook" arose because Reagan once played the role of George Gipp (known as The Gipper) in a movie. Gipp had a real playbook, so Reagan, who was never actually a halfback in the early 1900's, swiped the term.

First, he cut taxes. This requires a playbook? All Republicans hate taxes - unless they're levied on poor people -- but they do like some of the benefits, such as Congressional healthcare, obsolete weapons and expensive hookers.

The Founders didn't like taxes either, especially on tea. Which begs the question: why didn't they just drink coffee instead? If they had, the 1777 Spring Break wouldn't have been at Valley Forge. In one sense, the Founders were rich guys who could afford to pay taxes but didn't want to. We have a name for this group now. We call it the GOP.

One of the biggest "playbook" entries is Reaganomics, a truly brilliant policy which reduced government regulation of the economy, and we all know what a god-awful mess that farsighted idea was.

Reagan's "playbook" also included a boneheaded attempt to shut down Medicare. Why? Because he thought it was socialism. Sound familiar?

Another part of the "playbook" was how tough Reagan was on Communism. Republicans still believe that Reagan single-handedly won the Cold War because he was a cowboy and cowboys are tough. He also starred in a movie in which he was upstaged by a chimpanzee.

The truth is, if it hadn't been for Mikhail Gorbachev-who, incidentally, won the Nobel Peace Prize --- Reagan's macho speechifying would have been pointless. Had he said: "Tear down this wall, Mr. Brezhnev," do you really think the Kremlin would have hauled out the bulldozers? No. They would have said "eat me," in Russian.

Here's one of Reagan's more inspired "playbook" achievements: The Star Wars Defense System. Thanks to him, we sunk billions into a moronic fantasy weapon that couldn't successfully prevent a gaggle of low-flying geese from relieving themselves on St. Louis, let alone intercept a Soviet ICBM.

Twenty-five years later, this expensive piece of garbage still misses everything in its path, except maybe for the occasional cloud, but that's probably just luck.

Apparently, the "playbook" required Reagan's presidential handlers to invent untrue but endearing nicknames for their boss, such as "The Great Communicator." He wasn't. He had a bumbling speaking style, which would have been really embarrassing if he hadn't been reading policy cue cards and old Vaudeville one-liners from a script for 8 years. Frankly, Reagan should have taken a page from Calvin Coolidge's playbook and just stopped talking.

Oh, and then there's the Iran-Contra scandal. Did he know about it or didn't he? If he did, he probably thought Iran-Contra was a new brand of disposable razor.

Then there's this one: The legacy part of the "playbook." Even though Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controller's Union, some bozo had the gall to name an airport after him. Nobody consulted me about it. I'm a citizen. I travel on airplanes. Did I miss the vote? If they name one after Dubya, I may have to start taking trains.

The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America

2009-12-23T05:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.juancole.com/

The Ten Worst Nightmares Bush Inflicted on America
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
December 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144755/

By spring of 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush was wrapping up the Republican nomination for president, and he went on to dominate the rest of the decade.

If Dickens proclaimed of the 1790s revolutionary era in France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times. I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs. Just as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union allowed the emergence of a class of lawless 'Oligarchs' in Russia, so Neoliberal tax policies and deregulation produced American equivalents. (For more on the analogy, see Michael Hudson.) We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class.

At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics. It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50, i.e. toward a Banana Republic. Thus, we have a gutted fairness doctrine and the end of anti-trust concerns in ownership of mass media, allowing a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch to buy up major media properties and to establish a cable television channel which is nothing but oligarch propaganda. They established 'think tanks' like the American Enterprise Institute, which hires only staff that are useful agents of the interests of the very wealthy, and which produce studies denying global climate change or lying about the situation in Iraq.

Bush-Cheney were not simply purveyors of wrong-headed ideas. They were the agents of the one percent, and their policies make perfect sense if seen as attempts to advance the interests of this narrow class of persons. It is the class that owns our mass media, that pays for the political campaigns of 'our' (their) representatives, that gives us the Bushes and Cheneys and Palins because they are useful to them, and that blocks progressive reform and legislation with the vast war chest funneled to them by deep tax cuts that allow them to use essential public resources, infrastructure and facilities gratis while making the middle class pay for them.

Here are my picks for the top ten worst things about the wretched period, which, however, will continue to follow us until the economy is re-regulated, anti-trust concerns again pursued, a new, tweaked fairness doctrine is implemented, and we return to a more normal distribution of wealth (surely a quarter of the privately held wealth is enough for the one percent?) It isn't about which party is in power; parties can always be bought. It is about how broadly shared resources are in a society. Egalitarianism is unworkable, but over-concentration of wealth is also impractical. The latter produced a lot of our problems in the past decade, and as long as such massive inequality persists, our politics will be lopsided.

10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy. Of all the income growth of the entire country of the United States in the Bush years, the richest 1 percent of the working population, about 1.3 million persons, grabbed up over two-thirds of it. The Reagan and Bush cuts in tax rates on the wealthy have created a dangerous little alien inside our supposedly democratic society, of the super-rich, with their legions of camp followers (sometimes referred to as 'analysts' or 'economists' or 'journalists'). The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn't want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans. Health care costs skyrocketed. Most Americans in the work force who have health care are covered via their employers. 'From 1999 to 2009 health insurance premiums increased 132%" for the companies paying most of the costs of coverage to their employees. Euromonitor adds, "Average private health insurance premiums for a family of four in 1999 were US$5,485 per annum or 7.2% of household disposable income. 2008 premiums were estimated at US$12,973 per annum or 14.8% of average household disposable income." By Bush's last year in office, food insecurity among American families was at a 14-year high. About 49 million Americans, one in six of us, worried about having enough food to eat at some points in that year, and resorted to soup lines, food stamps, or dietary shortcuts. Some 16 million, according to the NYT, suffered from '"very low food security," meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.' Hundreds of thousands of children are going hungry in the richest country in the world. From being a proud, wealthy people, our social superiors reduced us to the estate of third-world peasants, so as to make sure their bonuses were bigger.

8. The environment became more polluted. The Bush administration was the worst on record on environmental issues. Carbon emissions grew unchecked, and the threat of climate change accelerated. In fact, Bush muzzled government climate scientists and had their reports rewritten by lawyers from Big Oil.

7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back. But note that its powers were never used against the oligarchs (unlike the case in Putin's Russia), but rather deployed to ensure the continued destruction of the labor movement and the political bargaining power of workers and the middle class, and to harass and disrupt peace, rights and environmental movements. A part of this process was the abrogation of fourth amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure and snooping into people's mail and effects, and of other key constitutional rights under vague and unconstitutional rubrics such as 'providing material aid to terrorists,'(rights which seem unlikely ever to be restored).

6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America's great cities. The administration's unconcern about the unsound dam infrastructure, about climate change, and about the fate of the victims are all a wake-up call for what all of us have in store from the small social class that Bush served.

5. The Bush administration's post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised. The Bush administration's attempt to assert itself with a big troop presence in the Pashtun provinces, its use of search and destroy tactics and missile strikes, its neglect of civilian reconstruction, and its failure to finish off al-Qaeda, allowed an insurgency gradually to grow. It should have been nipped in the bud, but was not. Once an insurgency becomes well established, it is defeated militarily only about 20 percent of the time. Eight years later, the Neoconservative thrust into Central Asia (in search of hydrocarbon leverage, or in a geopolitical pissing match with Russia and China?) of the early years of this decade has bequeathed us yet another war, this time one that could destabilize neighboring Pakistan-- the world's sole Muslim nuclear power.

4. The Iraq War, which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over as million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran's hand in the Middle East. All this on false pretexts such as 'weapons of mass destruction' or 'democratization,' for the sake of opening the Iraqi oil markets to US hydrocarbon firms-- a significant faction of the oligarchic class. Cost to the US in American military life: 4,373 dead as of Dec 15 and 31,603 wounded in combat. The true totals of war-related dead and injured are higher, since 30,000 troops who were only diagnosed with brain injuries on their return to the US are not counted in the statistics, according to Michael Munk. The cost of the Iraq War when everything is taken into account will likely be $3 trillion.

3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air. Having allowed the one-percent oligarchs to capture most of the increase of the country's wealth in recent decades, Bush and Paulsen now initiated the surrender to them of nearly a further entire year's gross domestic product of the US, stealing it from the rest of us by deficit budget financing that will have the effect of deflating our savings and property values and relative value of our currency against other world currencies. That is, we are to be further beggared for sake of the super-rich. And while the banks and bankers are held harmless, the hardworking Americans who have lost and will lose their homes are extended virtually no help. While 500,000 American children will go hungry at least some of the time this year, the Oligarchs at Goldman, Sachs, will get millions in bonuses, on the backs of the ordinary taxpayers. It seems likely to me that the creation of a pool of vast excess liquidity for the super-rich by the Reagan-Cheney tax cuts was what impelled them to develop the derivatives, since they had too much capital for ordinary investment purposes and were restlessly seeking new gaming tables. The conclusion is that until we get our gini coefficient back into some sort of synch, we are likely at risk for further such meltdowns.

2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other. Al-Qaeda's largely Arab volunteer fighters had confronted the Soviets over their occupation of a major Muslimm country, Afghanistan. Bin Laden was himself a Neoliberal Oligarch, but he broke with the Gulf consensus of seeking a US security umbrella, thus creating a fissure within his powerful social class. Al-Qaeda viewed the US as only a slightly less objectionable occupier, though they were willing to make an atliance of convenience in the 1980s. But they were increasingly enraged and galvanized to strike, they said, by the post-Gulf-War sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, the debilitating Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, and the establishment of US bases in the holy Arabian Peninsula (with its oil riches that Bin Laden believed were being looted for pennies by the West, aided by a supine and corrupt Saudi dynasty). Al-Qaeda was a small fringe crackpot group of murderous conspiracy theorists, since most of what they considered an American 'occupation' of Muslims was no such thing. The leasing of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? They intended to make themselves look like a world-historical force, and the US new Oligarchs, who no longer had the international Communist conspiracy with which to scare the American public into letting them have their way, were happy to buy in to the hyping of al-Qaeda, as well. But the catastrophe was not only the attacks, deadly and horrific though they were, but the alacrity with which Americans rsurrendered their birthright of yeoman liberties to a Bonapartist regime that ran roughshod over law, the constitution, the Congress, and anyone, such as Ambassador Joe Wilson, who dared oppose it.

1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs.

You Americans are so Gullible!

2009-12-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.infowars.com/you-americans-are-so-gullible/

You Americans are so Gullible!
Posted By admin On December 13, 2009
Adam Murdock, M.D.
Infowars.com
December 13, 2009

There are two opposing forces locked in eternal combat. When one force gains the upper hand the other force is subjugated. Throughout history the pendulum has swung from one end to the other. Most recently the forces of individual freedom scored a victory with the founding of the United States and creation of the U.S. Constitution. However, over the past two hundred years the forces of domination have been slowly eroding the belief in and support for liberty.

Khrushchev: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright. But we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have communism.”

This epic battle is documented in a speech delivered by the Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower, Ezra T. Benson. He said:

“I have personally witnessed the heart-rending results of the loss of freedom. I have talked face-to-face with the godless Communist leaders. It may surprise you to learn that I was host to Mr. Khrushchev for a half-day when he visited the United States. Not that I’m proud of it. I opposed his coming then, and I still feel it was a mistake to welcome this atheistic murderer as a state visitor.

As we talked face-to-face, he indicated that my grandchildren would live under Communism. After assuring him that I expected to do all in my power to assure that his, and all other grandchildren, will live under freedom, he arrogantly declared, in substance:

‘You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright. But we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you; we’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.’”

So it is that Khrushchev has been proven right. We may not have had a socialist military coup that changed things overnight, but we have had a purposefully gradual attack on our belief in the essential nature of freedom. These “small doses of socialism” have changed America and been the cause for the loss of much of our freedom.

In the latest saga the forces of dominion are attempting to solidify their control. This is evident in three epic battles of the last couple years. First, it was our economic freedoms that came under attack when the Federal Reserve-propelled illusory housing and stock market boom crumbled. Instead of letting the mal-invested assets liquidate, our government and the governments of the world have subjugated the people of the earth to an unbearable debt burden.

Those that have prospered from our economic demise have been the politburo-like corporate stock holders of our government officials. In addition, as Main Street plunges into despair, more and more federal bureaucrats are making six figures. In fact, it was recently revealed that the average federal employee now makes $30,000 more than private sector employees. Only in a communist system does the government class prosper while the rest of us wait in bread lines. Now these same bureaucrats are contemplating further bailouts for their corporate banking buddies.

Since the initial Bush bailouts and their expansion under President Obama have come some even more dire threats to our freedom. If we fail to rise to defeat these threats, I am afraid that we will see the pendulum become affixed permanently in the direction of dominion and slavery.

The second imminent threat to our freedom is the healthcare bills being currently deliberating in Washington. The Healthcare act that will come out of these deliberations will claim to both make healthcare more affordable and increase health care choice. However, it will do the exact opposite. Since the state of Massachusetts adopted a similar model of mandated health insurance, they have seen the fastest rise in the medical costs of any state in the union. The only way to control these costs in Massachusetts and at the Federal level will be through forced rationing. Your physician will become a slave of the system and will place you in a healthcare bread line. In addition, anyone that is intimately connected with the current government programs Medicare and Medicaid, as I am, knows that these systems do not increase choice but rather restrict choice. It is often very difficult if not impossible for recipients of Medicaid to see specialists or to get advanced care. Such will be the case for the majority of Americans as we are forced into these programs.

The third imminent threat to our freedom seeks to subjugate the people of the earth to a global government under the guise of pseudoscience. As the ‘climategate’ emails and statements by presidents of the UN and the EU reveal, a global super state is in its final stages of completion. Climate change falsehoods will provide the impetus or stepping stone for the creation of this super state. As recently revealed by Lord Monckton, this proposed system will create hundreds of new international bureaucracies and impose a 2 % tax on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of first-world nations. The proposals will also limit the development of third-world nations by setting a limit on the per-capita carbon production of these nations to roughly half of the per-capita carbon limit for first-world nations. This will serve to permanently confine these nations to poverty with no hope of escape.

It is not a mystery that the prosperity of a nation is directly tied to its carbon production. Without the ability to utilize carbon resources these nations will never be able to compete with the first-world nations. In addition, the resultant poverty will condemn these populations to starvation, disease, and death.

In the end, each of us will have to answer to our conscience. Who among us will have the courage to make a phone call or write a letter? These seemingly simple acts are often all that is required to turn the tide. If we fail to act, our grandchildren will never forgive us for being the “gullible” Americans that let freedom bow down to slavery.

For help contacting your elected representatives, click here.

Adam Murdock, M.D. is founder of The Freemen Institute, www.freemeninstitute.com.

The Politics of Cynicism

2009-12-10T09:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio12092009.html

December 9, 2009
Obama, Afghanistan and the 2012 Elections
The Politics of Cynicism
By ANTHONY DiMAGGIO

Machiavelli would be proud of President Obama. This administration has revealed itself as highly cynical, dedicated to winning re-election at the expense of rational debate on Afghanistan, or the serious consideration of public opposition to war. Machiavelli was famous, among other things, for his pioneering of a belief in amoral politics - the commitment to gaining power at the expense of standing for any larger principals or for the promotion of the public good. Obama has behaved similarly, as a close review of his pro-war rhetoric and actions demonstrate.

Much of Obama’s West Point speech consisted of incoherent, Orwellian doublethink. Obama celebrated the “legitimate government [that] was elected by the Afghan people,” while patronizing the government as being “hampered by corruption.” He promised that the U.S. has “no interest in occupying [Afghanistan],” while escalating an unpopular counterinsurgency that most Afghans feel will directly harm them. Obama explained that “America seeks an end to this war and suffering” and “has no interest in fighting an endless war,” yet sent 48,000 troops to continue a violent, destabilizing counterinsurgency campaign with no concrete end in sight.

Progressive journalists and scholars level many criticisms at the Obama plan. Critics seize on the administration’s own damning estimate that just 100 al Qaeda are currently operating in Afghanistan, and question the seeming ridiculousness of sending 100,000 troops to defeat such a small target. Critics also draw attention to the imminent humanitarian consequences of the escalation. As a social movement, the Taliban operates on many levels throughout the Pashtun Helmand province, and there is realistically no way to separate it from the people of the region’s people by engaging in “surgical,” “precision” bombing. Civilians will inevitably bear the brunt of the punishment from U.S. bombings, as has happened with the predator drone strikes on “terrorist targets” in Pakistan.

On the level of procedural criticisms, the Obama administration has demonstrated little critical insight into how to evaluate when this conflict will, or should end. Obama’s Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, explained that “success” in this campaign will be measured by intangible standards. Success, Holbrooke concluded, will be decided by a “Supreme Court test,” where “we’ll know [progress] when we see it.” Holbrooke’s comment draws specifically on the statement of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who attempted to establish standards for identifying “hard core” pornography and obscenity: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced, but I know it when I see it.”

U.S. involvement in Afghanistan begins to look like less than a sincere effort to rebuild the country and help it transition away from its failed state status when Obama himself publicly admits that nation building is out of the question, since it goes “beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost.” The Obama administration also has not been honest with the American public about the state of Afghanistan’s national army and police forces. Democrats loudly pronounce the importance of training Afghan security forces, while remaining silent on the pragmatic and substantive problems with this task. On the pragmatic level, as Time magazine reports, “the president’s West Point speech was mute on his plans for the growing Afghan army, which remains the best way to bring home American personnel.” As Al Jazeera English reports, Obama failed to discuss the official overestimates of the status of Afghanistan’s military and police. While traditional estimates suggest that Afghanistan retains 90-100,000 standing forces, critical estimates put the real size at no more than 55,000, to as low as 35-40,000. As James Bayes of Al Jazeera reports from Kabul: “the whole exit strategy for international troops depends on the size and the capability of Afghan security forces. It is clear after eight years that both the U.S. and Afghan government don’t even know how many soldiers and policemen there really are.”

On the level of substantive and moral criticisms, the Obama administration has not leveled with the American public about the serious human rights atrocities of the U.S. bombing campaign - which has killed thousands of civilians - and of U.S.-supported Afghan national forces. While publicly celebrating the U.S. commitment to promoting humanitarianism, democracy, and counter-terror, Obama quietly supports a terrorist police force in the Helmand province that is “linked to the local warlord, [and] has committed systematic abuses against the population, including the abduction and rape of pre-teen boys, according to village elders” (see Gareth Porter’s excellent piece: “A Bigger Problem than the Taliban?” Inter Press Service).

The full extent of Obama’s cynical, Machiavellian politics is evident after asking a few simple questions: 1. Out of all the possible dates, why set a timetable for withdrawal beginning in July of 2011?; and 2. Why immediately contradict that timetable, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates did, by claiming immediately after Obama’s West Point speech that withdrawal dates will be determined by “conditions on the ground” in Afghanistan?

The answers to these questions are obvious: these statements provide the Democrats with an extremely flexible timetable which will allow them to react to public opinion and conditions in Washington (related to Afghanistan and the escalation) in time for the 2012 presidential election. If the war is publicly perceived as having hurt Obama’s re-election chances, discussion will emerge about the need to reduce troops, with Democrats portraying themselves as the “anti-war” party against the pro-war Republicans. If Republicans are effective in convincing Americans of the need to remain in Afghanistan and that a drawdown demonstrates American weakness and poses a national security risk, Democrats will enjoy maximum maneuverability to continue the war and occupation, and perhaps even add more troops. The advantage to keeping all options open goes like this: Democrats, who are scared to death of being seen as weak on national security, can “out-hawk” the hawks in the Republican Party. After all, why elect a Republican to the White House on the grounds that he/she is strong on national security when the Democrats are already pursuing the same strategy supported by a Republican candidate?

The cynicism of the Obama administration’s strategy is in no way unique to American politics. Scholars have documented the attempts of political officials to manipulate public opinion (rather than to implement it) in their formulation of public policy. In their book, Politicians Don’t Pander, Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro find that “politicians manipulate public opinion by tracking public thinking to select the actions and words that resonate with the public.” Politicians don’t identify what the public thinks so that they can implement the popular will; rather they try to change public opinion to fit a pre-existing policy. Jacobs and Shapiro quote Republican and Democratic pollsters who represent Congress and the White House, admitting that they “don’t use a poll to reshape a [public] program, but to reshape your argumentation for the program so that the public supports it.”

The Obama administration can’t afford to be ignorant about the state of public opinion on foreign policy. Studies confirm that presidents have always followed what the public is thinking. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election in 1968 due to his low public popularity. Johnson closely followed public opinion polls on Vietnam during the U.S. escalation, as did Richard Nixon when he took office. As Lyndon’s National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy admitted about the administration’s knowledge of public opinion: “It’s ninety percent of the people who don’t want any part of this” war. Nixon similarly admitted that “democracies are not well equipped to fight prolonged wars.” Public resistance inevitably develops as politicians’ promises of victory begin to conflict with the reality that prolonged occupation is accompanied by bloody violence, misery, and destruction. As public opinion scholar Richard Sobel concludes about Vietnam: “as the shift in opinion around [the 1968] Tet [offensive] helped drive LBJ to deescalate, declining public support ultimately forced an end to the conflict at the start of Nixon’s second term…though most policymakers would have preferred more latitude [in conducting the war], they recognized that public opinion and protest limited the decisions they could take.”

Political officials in the post-Vietnam era have learned that the public has the power to pro-actively limit militaristic policy planning. The Reagan administration was unable to use direct military force against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas due to public opposition to use of U.S. troops (and even opposition to use of proxy troops) in a terrorist war against the government and people of Nicaragua. George H. W. Bush also learned that the public would not support long-term occupation of Iraq, as a “Vietnam Syndrome” ensured that there was little tolerance for open-ended conflicts marked by uncertainty, high cost, and tremendous destruction. George W. Bush ignored this lesson at his peril in committing to a long-term occupation in Iraq, as his administration suffered the lowest levels of confidence in public opinion polls in the post-World War II era. Obama originally gained much support from the public by promising to end the Iraq war, although his credentials as an “anti-war” president are difficult to take seriously in light of the Afghan escalation.

There are remarkable similarities between the Reagan and Obama administrations in terms of their attempts to manipulate the American public. In attempting to sell U.S. support for the Contra guerilla terrorists in their war on Nicaragua, former Regan Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliot Abrams remarked that U.S. public opinion polls on Nicaragua were seen as “weapons” to be used against the public. “The polls could not tell us what policy ought to be. We had a policy. We arrived in office with a policy. Over time tactics changed but the fundamental policy did not change.” Abrams admits that the “importance of public opinion” in terms of influencing U.S. policy was “relatively low. It was not a direct constraint” in pressuring the administration to abandon its war on the Sandinista government. J. Edward Fox, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs reflects: “the real objective [in Nicaragua] was not to seek a favorable referendum by the American public to guide our policy in the region, but to figure out ways to tap public sentiment to support what we were already doing…public opinion has not been a major influence in foreign policy debates. Historically they have been dominated by elites.”

As with Nicaragua, the Obama administration had a pre-existing policy - support for escalation - that stood in contrast with public opposition to war. As with Reagan, Obama also had two choices in his decision making on Afghanistan. He could choose to take public opinion seriously - which showed that a majority of Americans opposed the continuation of the war as of mid-to-late 2009 - or he could disregard public opinion and seek to manipulate the public will. Obama chose the latter, making the case in early December for escalating what was, and remains to a lesser extent, an unpopular war. This approach appears to have paid off, at least in the short term, as a Quinnipiac poll from this month found that support for war increased by nine percent in the last three weeks, and following Obama’s speech. While more than six in ten Americans felt the Afghan war was going “fairly or very badly” as of late 2009, the percent of Americans who “oppose” the war fell by seven percent from October to December of this year, while those who “favor” war increased by six percent, according to CNN polls. Framing of the conflict is key in manipulating public sentiment. CNN polling found that public 58 percent of Americans opposed the war in September of 2009 when asked generically if “you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?” When framed in terms of eventual withdrawal, however, public support for escalation became more supportive. A USA Today/Gallup poll from December of 2009 finds that 51 percent of Americans support the Obama plan for war when the question is preceded by the statement that “Obama has decided to increase the number of U.S. troops…while also setting a timetable that calls for the U.S. to begin withdrawing troops from that country in 2011.” It should be noted that, for the Machiavellian cynic, this approach retains the advantage of enabling escalation while paying lip service to public support for withdrawal.

The long term prognosis for Obama’s escalation does not look good. While Obama may have squeaked out bare majority support for war as of December (remember the 51 percent figure from Gallup), lessons of the past suggest that Obama’s credibility will dramatically decline as the war continues throughout 2010 and 2011. Increasing financial cost of war (especially during recessions), in addition to growing U.S. military casualties and the violent destabilization of occupied countries, are major historically major causes for growing public opposition to war. All of these conditions are likely to materialize as this conflict escalates, and as Democrats begin lose their grip over Congress and the White House.

Anthony DiMaggio teaches American and Global Politics at Illinois State University. He is the author of Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008) and the forthcoming When Media Goes to War (2010). He can be reached at adimagg@ilstu.edu

The Constitutional Bankruptcy of our Republic

2009-12-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Constitutional-Bankrup-by-Nathan-Janes-091129-807.html

December 3, 2009
The Constitutional Bankruptcy of our Republic
By Nathan Janes

Uncle Sam was created as a symbol of the United States representing the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice. Although this symbol has been a patriotic representation for over 150 years, Uncle Sam cannot stand as a fair symbol of our nation any longer. With recent attacks to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, citizens' rights have been eroded. If this long time representative of our nation could speak to us today perhaps he would remind us that our constitution gives us unalienable rights from the creator to the individual and can not under any circumstance be surrendered or taken.

Contrary to the common misconception, the United States is a constitutional republic and not a democracy. In a republic, the sovereignty resides with the people themselves and one may act on his own or through his representatives when he chooses to confront a problem. The people have no obligation to the government; instead, the government is a servant of the people. Since September 11, 2001 we have been witnessing the destruction of our republic. Congress is gradually dismantling the Bill of Rights and the Constitution with the strong influence of the two most recent presidents. The public is distracted by a left/right paradigm that is controlled by the establishment. While the public is busy criticizing those on the other side of the paradigm, the establishment's power grab goes unchecked and our constitutional rights are further eroded. In this way national sovereignty and the freedom of individuals is being destroyed.

On October 26, 2001, American citizens' right to privacy ended with the passage of the Patriot Act. Of the 435 US Representatives, the Patriot Act was read by no one before it was voted on and passed, a violation of the Representatives' oath of office. The 342 paged bill allows for violations to citizens' rights including the search of home and property without knowledge or consent of the citizen, known as "sneak and peek" spying. Also permitted by the bill is the indefinite imprisonment of any citizen without due process, access to the courts, or the counsel of a lawyer. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now able to obtain records from businesses, hospitals, bookstores, and libraries for any reason and can search phone, email, and financial records without a court order.

Since the passing of the Patriot Act, a number of bills have been initiated and passed by Congress, which further violate citizens' liberties. The Military Commissions Act of October 17, 2006 assigns dictatorial powers to the president while stripping citizens of the right to habeas corpus.The John Warner National Defense Act empowers military troops to police within US cities during emergency situations to suppress public disorder and dissent, a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. The US has also engaged in torture, initiated undeclared wars, built FEMA camps that closely resemble concentration camps, encouraged the public to spy on each other, and committed several other acts that allow the government to have increased control over the lives of its citizens.

A number of groups and individuals constitute the establishment or ruling class elite and wield enormous influence over our country's policy makers. Our government servants are constantly changing laws to favor and protect global banks. While the Constitution is being destroyed, these global bankers are committing financial terrorism. The private banking cartel of the Federal Reserve has been all but openly permitted to bankrupt our country and destroy our wealth, setting up the need for a global currency. The multinational corporations as well as the technocrats of large foundations and other non-governmental organizations lobby congress with a large degree of influence as well. Seldom is it the voice of ordinary citizens the shapes the actions and opinions of our representatives in congress.

From the influence of the global powers and ruling establishment a new world order is emerging. Once only recognized by the media as mere conspiracy, it is now considered a reality as hundreds of articles across the world address this issue on a weekly basis. The standardization of one system of government throughout the world is steadily being introduced as we come into the Age of World Managers. If you look at the charter and mandate of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, you will see that the future they envision is a world of service. According to these documents, every individual's only purpose will be to serve the world state. We are living through a cultural revolution right now that is transitioning us into a world system.

The major media plays a significant role in forming social opinion as it relates to global and national events. Many people's thoughts and opinions are chiefly shaped by what they view on television. These individuals have been trained not to look at the obvious but only at what is presented to them. This country has fallen victim to a form of psychic tyranny, where we have become mind slaves of major media mainly through the use of television. If you study Stalin you will see how those in power know that the masses can be strongly influenced by repetition. The media bombards the public with repetition of certain thoughts or opinions and individuals slowly start to adopt these thoughts and opinions as their own. Lenin once said, "We shall conquer the world by the use of slogans." President Obama was elected on an array of slogans one of which was taken from a children's cartoon, "Yes We Can."

Our culture, created mainly by the mass media, has trained the public to be docile and apathetic. The people of the US have become conditioned to accept what is presented to them; they are kept in a state of ignorance as to the true on goings of our government. Rather than trust themselves, many people will only shape their opinions from those who are presented as experts or authority figures in the mass media. In this way the US resembles the beginnings of a scientific dictatorship - a managed society ruled by the intellectual elite. It will be through the use of slogans and scientific experts that the new world order will be ushered in; the establishment is ensuring a smooth transition to a global system without significant opposition from the people.

Public relations pioneer Edward Bernays wrote in his 1928 book, "Propaganda", "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." Every day it grows more evident that we do not control the government; the government is controlled by the global elite who are increasingly managing the people. Our nation is becoming something that we have long fought against. A repressive society has been created within this once great nation and "we the people" are unwittingly becoming serfs to our own public servants. Their objective to rule rests in the annihilation of our consciousness as they create a state of learned helplessness among the masses. If we don't wake up and become conscious of where our country is heading, we may soon find ourselves in a world resembling a prison planet of total centralized control where all our freedoms are taken away for our supposed security. It's time for people to start being individuals and to create independent thought. Since 2001, government officials have repeatedly said, "Terrorists hate us for our freedom." Now it is clear that the true terrorists are the ruling establishment working through those who are elected to represent and serve the people.

Transforming Perceptions Of Reality

2009-12-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Transforming-Perceptions-O-by-James-Raider-091201-459.html

December 2, 2009
Transforming Perceptions Of Reality
By James Raider

We have entered a new phase of reality distortion as negative events become positive in their reporting. Truth is being transformed. I don't refer here to politicians lying about the state of affairs to promote a self serving scheme or other, I refer to the mainstream media and its warped reporting of the reality its audience lives through each day.

Perhaps we subconsciously need the adulteration of our realities, converting them into distracting wishful deceptions. Is there a chance that the effect is dispersing our anxieties? With so many directly affected by a burst-mortgage-bubble recession, positive spins are readily accepted. How else can one explain an acceptance, with all associated relief, of continuing increases in unemployment numbers? Is it because the totals are not as bad as had been expected? How did it make any sense that the financial institutions most responsible for the current state of economic affairs became the too-big-to-fail partners of government? Is there any doubt that Wall Street controls the agenda?

Why is it good news that government has insinuated itself into the heart of American industry while permanently bolstering union influence over the management of companies like GM? Has something new been introduced into the concept of socializing industry? Did Soviet Russia not prove beyond any doubt that government-in-charge doesn't work? The current version of hope-and-change appears to simply mean Big Government.

Is it really good news that the health care industry is heading irreversibly toward a day when it will be a government run business? Were there not alternative strategies available to seriously improve the state of health care including those discussed here: Health Care - What You Are Not Hearing? But wait, there's more good news coming, and please ignore the $12 trillion U.S. national debt almost equaling the Nation's GDP, since it only amounts to $111,000 per taxpayer. It is apparently great news that this amount is minor when compared to the funds “committed” to health care and pensions that the Baby Boomer generation is fully expecting just around the corner.

When a President professes concern about deficits, but supports unprecedented spending programs sending the Country into out-of-control deficits and debt, the headlines read, “good news,” because he doesn't really want to do it, but he has to. The media sells us the gossamer subtlety of "intent," to promote acceptability of truth distortion. The fawning mainstream media is doing its best to channel public consciousness down the feel good road.

Look for more government stimulus money to be added to the already pegged $787 billion stimulus, much of which has been allocated to prominent Democratic districts. Over two thirds of the money is still awaiting distribution, obviously being held back for release at the most propitious time in order to achieve maximum influence on upcoming elections.

Fear has been very effectively used through the past few years by government to gain support for the implementation of decisions that might not have easily floated over the electorate otherwise. Positive spin has worked the fear, and converted absurd policies into amplified and satisfying rays of hope.

If the main stream media continues its persistent misrepresentations of the truth, hope will disintegrate completely as new intractable realities insinuate themselves permanently into the economic and social landscape. Taxpayers deserve better from their Fourth Estate and from their politicians. If this transformation of perceptions doesn't end soon, the result will be an irreversible transformation of America.

Joe Biden - Most Powerful Vice President After Cheney?

2009-12-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29Biden-t.html?_r=5&ref=magazine

November 29, 2009
After Cheney
Joe Biden - Most Powerful Vice President After Cheney?
By JAMES TRAUB

When Vice President Biden travels to Iraq, which he does every two months or so, he flies on Air Force Two to an airbase in southern England and then transfers to a cargo plane, a C-17, retrofitted for vice-presidential comfort with an Airstream trailer bolted on to tracks in the center of the hold. With its porthole and shiny rivets and gleaming chrome, this strange conveyance looks like something out of Jules Verne. Captain Biden holds court in a wood-paneled galley just large enough for his half-dozen or so aides to pile into. Unlike Nemo, he is a gregarious knee-squeezer who has to be ordered by his staff to stop talking so he can get some rest.

I had the first of several long conversations with Biden in the Airstream this summer on his return from his first trip to Iraq as vice president. With violence much reduced and some signs of political reconciliation, Iraq had suddenly switched places with Afghanistan to become the war we ignore; but Obama-administration officials feared that Iraq would sink back into fratricide unless Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds made the painful compromises they had avoided so far. President Obama had committed to ending America’s combat role in the country by Aug. 31, 2010; though both the American and Iraqi publics demanded the withdrawal, it endangered Iraq’s very fragile security and reduced American leverage at a crucial moment of political transition. Early last June, the president asked Biden to take responsibility for Iraq.

During the course of a two-day trip to Baghdad, Biden met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other leading political figures. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations had come to view Maliki as a sectarian Shiite bent on marginalizing Iraq’s Sunni minority. “You’ve never heard me prior to this trip singing the praises of Maliki,” Biden said. He had changed into his Airstream mufti — short-sleeve knit shirt and natty dark slacks. He is impressively trim for a 67-year-old, especially one scarcely known for self-discipline.

Biden said he had been having second thoughts about Maliki. In March of last year, the prime minister sent troops to suppress the forces of Moktada al-Sadr and the militias that controlled the southern city of Basra — Shiites in both cases. He had alienated parts of his base and launched an appeal across sectarian lines. “He’s got a real problem,” Biden said, following this new train of thought, “and if he wants to stay in power” — an election is looming next year — “how does he do it?” He needed to assemble a winning coalition. Would he seek Kurdish support? Sunni support? Both? But how, given that the Kurds and Sunnis were at each other’s throats? “These guys put their pants on one leg at a time,” Biden said. “They’re still politicians.”

Here was a Joe Biden guiding principle. Unlike Obama, Biden has spent virtually his entire life in politics. It is his medium: he talks about world leaders the way a grizzled baseball coach talks about the opposing lineup. I once heard him say, “Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.” One of the chief reasons that Obama has sought Biden’s advice on a range of pressing foreign-policy questions — most notably, in recent months, on policy in Afghanistan — is that Biden has a deep knowledge of, and an intuitive feel for, people and places still new to the president. He appears to have judged right on Iraq, where the coming elections should constitute a major success both for the Iraqis and for the Obama administration. But that’s only if they actually occur. Iraqi leaders may still choose sectarian over national interest no matter the consequences — and they’ve shown signs of doing just that. Politics are not, alas, the same all over.

AS SENATORS, BARACK OBAMA and Joe Biden were far from close. Obama served on the Foreign Relations Committee, which Biden led; and Biden, who felt that he had earned his stars the old-fashioned way, bristled at Obama’s status as instant superstar. “They started out pretty far apart,” a Biden aide says. They went on to run against each other for the Democratic nomination for the presidency; before Biden dropped out of the race he criticized Obama as a foreign-policy neophyte who was copying his ideas. Brian Katulis, a national-security expert at the Center for American Progress, recalls encountering Biden wandering around the executive-suite floor in the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad late one night in February 2008, looking for someone to talk to. Biden invited Katulis and a visiting former congressman down to the hotel restaurant for a milkshake, and then delivered a 90-minute monologue, the essence of which was: “I know more about foreign policy than any of the other candidates in the race, and I’m going to devote the next six months to rewriting Democratic foreign policy.”

Biden said he believed — and still believes — that he would make a very good president. He was nervous about accepting Obama’s offer of the vice presidency, fearing that he would suffer a loss in status, and in voice, from his role as a Senate baron. According to John Podesta, a former official in the Clinton White House who ran Obama’s transition, Biden “had a fairly clear sense in his own mind, which probably existed even before he was selected by Obama but definitely in the weeks in advance of and right after the election, that he didn’t want to be the guy in charge of x portfolio.” Instead, Biden wanted the role every vice president wants, but which perhaps only his predecessor, Dick Cheney, had enjoyed: to be the last voice in the room.

The president and the vice president are very different men both temperamentally and generationally, and they move in different social circles. “Everyone wants this to be some kind of buddy movie — ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ ” as one senior White House official, who asked not to be named so he could speak freely, put it. “Presidents and vice presidents are never close friends. It’s a working relationship; it’s more like the C.E.O. and the chairman of the board.”

Yet, on foreign policy, Biden has largely realized his wish to be the president’s all-purpose adviser and sage. He attends the president’s daily briefing every morning with James L. Jones, the national-security adviser; often Biden will stay behind for a few minutes to raise other issues. He has a weekly lunch with the president and no staff members. He sits in on most of the “principals’ meetings” of top national-security officials, which occur about once a week; unlike Cheney, a silent presence at these sessions, Biden has plenty to say. Biden attends every important meeting on foreign policy the president holds. “It’s me and him, and the cast of characters changes a little bit,” Biden told me not long ago during a conversation in his White House office. “I have the benefit of watching him react, and him watching me react. Very seldom a week goes by that he doesn’t call me down to his office, or wander in here and close the door and say, ‘Wait a minute, what about this?’ ”

Empire-building is not encouraged in the Obama administration. Biden has five aides who focus on foreign affairs, a large number save in comparison to Cheney, who had more than a dozen. No vice president had ever sought, or gained, the autonomy, or the supremacy over other power centers, that President Bush granted to Cheney. “He was his own separate branch of government,” as Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, puts it. “He took the office of the vice president out of the White House phone directory, and out of the White House budget.” Biden is seeking to “normalize” that relationship, Klain says. At the same time, people around Biden point out that he benefits from Cheney’s self-aggrandizement: Biden can reduce the scope of the office to something like its historic dimensions and still be the second-most powerful vice president in history.

And while Cheney’s staff fought for dominance with the White House, Biden’s is deeply enmeshed in the policy-making structure. His national-security adviser, Antony J. Blinken, and two other aides are also directors in the National Security Council, while a number of former Biden aides occupy important posts in the N.S.C. Thomas Donilon, deputy national-security adviser and coordinator of policy across agencies, has been a close friend of Biden’s since the 1980s; Donilon’s brother, Michael, is a senior adviser to Biden, and Donilon’s wife, Catherine Russell, was Biden’s former administrative assistant and is now chief of staff to Biden’s wife, Jill. During the transition, Biden told James Jones that he didn’t want his own N.S.C. but wanted to be able to call on the N.S.C. as needed. Jones complied; on the first day in office, he told his staff, “You work for the president and the vice president.” National-security aides routinely accompany Biden on his foreign trips. As one policymaker who was not authorized to comment publicly on internal administration issues said to me: “I don’t in my head distinguish between Office of the Vice President people and N.S.C. people. We’re all the White House staff.”

One of Biden’s early assignments from Obama was to adjudicate any disputes among the so-called team of rivals. Biden, as he himself points out, knew all of them longer than they did one another (or than the president did). Biden has breakfast with Hillary Clinton every Tuesday, meets with Defense Secretary Robert Gates about once a week and speaks constantly to James Jones. He was called on to mediate a dispute over turf between Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., and Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. Otherwise, the outward appearance of intramural harmony seems to correspond to reality. “I assure you,” Biden said to me, “among the principals there is a respect that I haven’t seen, because I think everybody, if not all on the same hymnal, they’re all on the same book. We don’t have one of those San Andreas faults” — like the Bush administration had.

The difference between Biden’s role and Cheney’s has at least as much to do with the culture of the two administrations as it does with the men themselves. Bush’s discomfort with world affairs created a vacuum that Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others fought to fill. Moreover, Bush’s tendency toward the snap judgment and the gut call undermined the formal policy process in favor of jockeying for position at key moments. By contrast, there is little question where foreign policy is now decided — in the Oval Office — and the absence of a San Andreas fault line has as much to do with clarity of authority as it does with personal vibes. What’s more, as the agonizingly deliberative debate over policy in Afghanistan has demonstrated, Obama wants to hear a case fully argued out before reaching a conclusion, even at some political risk. This perfectly suits Biden, a gifted expostulator and an indifferent schemer. On a wide range of issues, says James Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, Obama “knows that he can turn to Joe and say, ‘How are these people going to react, what are they going to say, how are they going to see it, what’s going to be in their mind?’ ”

THE INCOMING OBAMA national-security team believed that Iraq had constituted such an “intellectual-capital suck,” as one official put it, that other global problems had been allowed to fester. An early review persuaded State Department officials that the Balkans, where terrible wars were fought, and uneasily settled, in the 1990s, was one such problem. “We needed someone to go over there,” says one official who was not authorized to speak on the record, “and say we care, we’re interested, at a very high level.” Steinberg, who worked extensively on the issue in the Clinton era, was an obvious candidate; but Biden enjoyed enormous credibility in Bosnia and Kosovo, where as a senator he advocated military intervention in the face of Serbian aggression. And he was the vice president. Biden traveled to the region in mid-May. Invited to address the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the vice president warned that if growing ethnic tensions weren’t reduced, Bosnia would be kept out of the European Union and thus remain locked in poverty and might well “descend into ethnic chaos that defined your country for the better part of a decade.” (Steinberg says Biden’s rude jolt has “gotten the parties back talking to each other” but concedes that “whether we get them over the hurdles remains to be seen.”)

Biden, who would later make similar visits to Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine, was becoming Obama’s fire chief and ambassador without portfolio. These trips were one-time-only events. Iraq, however, was different. In its early months, the Obama administration arguably reversed the Bush mistake and started ignoring Iraq in favor of Afghanistan. Iraq had no special envoy and, for a portion of the spring, not even an ambassador. At a national-security meeting in early June, where discussion centered on the potential dangers of the impending drawdown of troops, Obama turned to Biden and said, as Biden recalls, “Joe, you do Iraq.” Biden says he was so surprised that at first he thought the president was kidding. In fact, the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, says it was his idea. “I’ve known the vice president for a long time,” Emanuel told me. “He has everything — gravitas, political smarts, the confidence of the players and knowledge of the issues. At the end of the day, this is a political process, and you need a politician to work on the process. And he has the authority of the White House.”

Emanuel also had the bright idea of sending Biden to Iraq for a July 4 photo op with the troops. The optics were everything the White House could have hoped for. Biden traveled to Al Faw Palace, a gigantesque Saddam Hussein-era structure once used for Baath Party functions, in order to administer the oath of American citizenship to 237 soldiers who had joined the military as immigrants. It was quite a sight — crisp ranks of African and Asian and Latino men and women lined up beneath a giant American flag hanging from the ceiling. Hussein was very fond of chandeliers; and from the lofty, tiled dome of Al Faw hung a mighty crystal chandelier orbited by little chandelier-moons, as perhaps lesser potentates were thought to orbit around Hussein. Except that it was all a fake: a soldier stationed at the palace told me that the chandelier was largely plastic and the gold fixtures were made of brass. The kingdom we had conquered was a stage set; now it was our stage set.

Biden loves a stage, and he loves all-American hokum. “As corny as it sounds,” he said, after Raymond T. Odierno, the commanding general in Iraq, addressed the troops, “damn, I’m proud to be an American.” He told a story about being driven to Camp Bondsteel, the home of American peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, and seeing, standing together, “a female colonel, a black captain, a white sergeant and, literally, a Hispanic private.” Turning to his Kosovar driver, he said: “That’s America. And until you understand that here, you’ll never be free.” After the Al Faw speech, Biden was taken to the DFAC — dining facility — in Baghdad’s International Zone (informally known as the Green Zone), where he met with the Delaware National Guard unit with which his son Beau served. Then he entered the cafeteria for a meet and greet. He lit up like a 1,000-watt bulb. Biden shook every hand, and threw his arm around every shoulder — hundreds and hundreds of them. “How are you, man?” he cried, with fresh joy, to each table of soldiers. “Did you get a picture of me?” A soldier said politely, “Look this way, sir,” and Biden, who has the blinding white teeth of a starlet, whirled around with a huge smile. The vice president never stopped moving, smiling or talking.

Biden’s goal for this first trip was to reassure Iraq’s leaders that Washington had not dropped their country in favor of Afghanistan, and to press them to reach agreement on a wide range of constitutional and political issues that had remained blocked for years — an agreement on oil revenues and sales, a formula for sharing power and resources between Baghdad and the provinces and the resolution of the border dispute between Arab Iraq and Kurdistan, especially involving the status of the Kirkuk region. Biden was determinedly upbeat, pointing out to the traveling press, jammed into his wood-paneled Airstream, that the phased American withdrawal was not leading to the bloodbath many predicted. “The Iraqis,” he said, “have become invested in their nationhood.” It was true that recent attacks by Sunni extremists had not provoked sectarian violence, as had been the case in 2006. But tensions between Arabs and Kurds had grown only worse. There was no sign of progress on the status of Kirkuk, which Kurds considered integral to their identity but which large populations of Arabs and Turkmen also claimed as their own. The 8.5 billion barrels of oil reserves estimated to be beneath Kirkuk made it a prize no one was willing to yield.

Biden knows a lot about Iraq, but his judgment has scarcely been perfect in the past. He opposed the first gulf war, voted to authorize the 2003 invasion and opposed the surge. “When was the last time Biden was right about anything?” the military writer Thomas E. Ricks asked in his blog earlier this fall, apropos of Biden’s current views on Afghanistan. Like many senior Democrats, Biden was an uneasy and equivocal supporter of the 2003 war. He now says that, at the time, he didn’t think the war was really “worth the candle.” In 2002 he convened hearings that focused attention on the enormous challenges that would come after a military victory — challenges the Bush administration went on to treat with stunning nonchalance. He and Senator Richard Lugar submitted a measure that would have required the Bush administration to either get explicit authorization for war from the U.N. Security Council or to stipulate to Congress that Iraq posed an “imminent threat” to U.S. security. When this effort collapsed, Biden voted to give Bush the authority to go to war without such restrictions. When I asked Biden if he felt, in retrospect, that he had made a mistake, he said: “To the extent that I made a mistake about the war it was, I trusted what I was being told by Bush personally. And I trusted that he in fact was not buying into the neocon argument.” The president had acted circumspectly in Afghanistan. Biden says he believed Bush when he said he wanted to return weapons inspectors to Iraq. It may also be that, like other liberal Democrats — especially those who voted against the first gulf war in 1991 — Biden did not feel that he could afford to fly with the doves.

AS A SENATOR, Biden did not give countries the once-over lightly, as most legislators do; he typically traveled with a colleague — usually Chuck Hagel, in the case of Iraq — and stayed for four or five days. Very few legislators, if any, could match his knowledge of people and places. On Iraq, Biden argued from the outset that the U.S. needed more troops, more civilians, more focus on politics and the long term. He did not, of course, make much headway.

But as growing sectarian violence reduced the Bush administration’s dream of a democratic Iraq to ashes, Biden began to have second, or third, thoughts. In May 2006, he and Leslie H. Gelb, an old friend who is a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, co-wrote an Op-Ed in this newspaper arguing that conflict among the major groups would inevitably frustrate designs for a centralized Iraqi state, and suggesting instead a Bosnia-type solution with three “largely autonomous” regions and a central government with functions limited to “border defense, foreign affairs and oil revenues.” Rather than staying forever or withdrawing precipitately, U.S. forces would leave Iraq by 2008.

The idea was unfamiliar and had no constituency. “I don’t know anyone else in politics who would do that,” Gelb told me. The proposal was flatly rejected by the dominant Shiites, who had no wish to dilute their power; the 2006 Iraq Study Group suggested that the plan could starve the Sunnis of economic resources. Scholars and policymakers asserted that the war in Bosnia, unlike the war in Iraq, ended with the three groups largely sorted into their own regions. The plan got little traction. Some who thought the proposal was flawed nevertheless admired Biden for making it. Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign-policy analyst at the Brookings Institution who has been more hawkish on the war than Biden, says, “When much of the rest of the country was taking sides — ‘Are you for it or against it?’ — Biden said, ‘Neither — the current strategy isn’t working, and here’s my alternative.’ ” O’Hanlon adds that Biden “was remarkably and admirably nonpartisan through ’04, ’05, ’06, as we were trying to sort out if we had any hope in Iraq.”

By 2007, however, Biden was running for president, and he sounded more like a highly partisan candidate than a dispassionate statesman. He asserted that Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the surge in Iraq, was “dead, flat wrong,” and that only a political solution based on his federalism plan could allow us to leave behind a stable Iraq. (Though Biden won’t quite admit it, the success of the surge has made a radical devolution of power unnecessary.) He argued that the greatest danger to America came from Pakistan rather than Iraq. He advocated strong action to prevent further atrocities in Sudan, including the imposition of a no-fly zone. And he argued, in general, that he understood the world better than any of his opponents did. Voters were not sufficiently impressed: Biden ended his campaign after the Iowa caucuses.

While Biden was in Baghdad, Prime Minister Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, pointedly noted that the constitutional concerns Biden hoped to advance are “internal issues that Iraqis will handle.” Maliki himself had been similarly standoffish, at least in public. But Iraqi officials were eager to use Biden as a go-between and advocate. Maliki gave his blessing to a proposal that Biden press Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, to postpone plans to hold a referendum on the Kurdish Constitution, which would have unilaterally absorbed Kirkuk. But a sandstorm, freakish even by Iraqi standards, prevented Biden from traveling to Kurdistan’s capital city, Erbil.

As soon as he returned to Washington, though, Biden hit the phones. He spoke regularly to Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and to General Odierno, the commander of American-led forces, as well as to Maliki, Barzani and other leadership figures. Biden pressed Maliki to carry through on plans to visit Kurdistan, and he pressed Barzani to postpone the referendum. He asked each man to stop describing the other as an enemy of peace. And those things did happen. A senior White House official says that Biden’s influence was crucial both in persuading Maliki to make the trip and in postponing the referendum. The Iraqis, on the other hand, take a more skeptical view of the American role. Sadiq al-Rikabi, Maliki’s political adviser, told me that the prime minister was simply responding to an invitation from Iraq’s president, while Barzani’s chief of staff, Fuad Hussein, ascribed the voting delay to “technical” issues. But Qubad Talabani, the representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government to the U.S., says Biden told Barzani it would be “unhelpful” if the Kurds held their referendum — “and we knew what that meant.” It meant that Arab outrage at the Kurdish annexation of Kirkuk could increase ethnic violence. Talabani gives Biden significant credit for helping to move the process forward. Biden, says Talabani, “is keeping us all honest and actually delivering results.”

iden’s role as vice president is not, of course, limited to foreign policy. Though his chief persona in global affairs is He Who Knows All World Leaders, in domestic affairs and the economy — subjects that never much interested him — he is regular Joe from working-class Delaware (and Pennsylvania, initially). The campaign often exploited his lunch-bucket cred to balance Obama’s lofty Harvard Yard aura on pocketbook issues. One of his jobs as vice president has been to make the public argument for Obama’s economic stimulus efforts. Biden is also the administration’s senior ambassador to the Senate. He regularly works out at the Senate gym, where he gets in as much schmoozing as exercise. His closest friends include current and former senators like Chuck Hagel and Christopher Dodd. He ended one of our conversations in order to make calls to the Senate on health care reform. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, told me Biden lobbied him and other members of the G.O.P. on the Kerry-Lugar bill mandating aid to Pakistan.

Biden’s former colleagues speak fondly of him, though they acknowledge his reputation as a windbag. “You can’t help but like Joe,” as Graham puts it. Biden’s vanity and his regard for his own gifts seem considerable even by the rarefied standards of the U.S. Senate: in his telling, the room is always falling silent as he confronts his listeners with the killer insight. Unlike his boss, Biden is not a particularly self-conscious person. I once heard him tell a very long anecdote — a very good anecdote, to be sure — in exactly the same words as he had told it to exactly the same audience about 36 hours earlier. His audience — reporters and aides on the C-17 — struggled to keep an expression of rapt attention on their faces, and to laugh at the places they had laughed the day before. Biden noticed nothing. You have the feeling that he has been spared the normal human allotment of reproach. But neither does he reproach others: Biden is the kind of fundamentally happy person who can be as generous toward others as he is to himself. One of his former aides — Washington is rife with them — told me that she had learned an important life lesson from her boss: “Question people’s judgment, not their motives.”

Biden has, it is true, occasionally provoked the famously disciplined president with his unscheduled rhetorical flights. After Biden ventured that administration policies had a “30 percent” chance of failure, Obama said at a press conference, “You know, I don’t remember what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly.” The White House was even more taken aback when, on his way home from Ukraine and Georgia, Biden told a reporter that Russia, facing historic decline, was “clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.” Obama called Biden and said, “What was that about?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to walk that one back on “Meet the Press.” Nonetheless, you can see Biden making the very visible effort to bite his tongue in public. And in White House deliberations he is said to have curbed his epic prolixity. “He’s much more disciplined now,” John Podesta says. “He speaks less; he waits until the end.”

The president and vice president tend to reach the same conclusions, if by different paths. In Biden’s worldview, which seems to be composed equally of temperament, experience and books, principles are very important as beacons, but they are dangerous, and often delusory, as direct guides to action. He shares with Obama a deep skepticism about wished-for outcomes, which makes him wary about conventional liberalism. He ran for the Senate in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam, but he says, “I wasn’t against the war for moral reasons; I just thought it was a stupid policy.”

Biden consumes policy books and loves nothing more than policy debate, but he is no more a theoretician or an ideologue than most politicians. On domestic policy, Biden has been a moderate liberal, favoring gun control and abortion rights, though also the Patriot Act and a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. On global affairs, Les Gelb calls him “a classic moderate American pragmatist,” applying broad principle but looking at each situation on its merits. Biden was an outspoken advocate of bombing Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, but he was at least as concerned about instability spreading toward Central Europe as he was about ending atrocities. And it was doable: “It was within our wheelhouse,” as Biden puts it. Ending atrocities in, say, Somalia, was not. Nor was democratizing the Arab world by invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein with a leader of our choosing. Biden’s constant criticism of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq was not that they were immoral but that they, like Nixon’s in Vietnam, were unrealistic. “ ‘The road to peace in the Middle East is through Baghdad’ — we never bought any of that,” he told me.

Biden says he used to meet regularly — “because we disagreed so much” — with Robert Kagan, the neoconservative champion of democracy promotion. Biden mocks the idea that “you can actually impose democracy” because “the yearning masses, yearning to be free and democratic” will “just embrace it.” Experience, he says, argues otherwise. At the same time, Biden refuses to accept the supposed choice between moralism and realism that, he says, dictates that in the face of authoritarian states like Russia or China, “you either decry the behavior and cut off relations, or you ignore the behavior and enhance your relations.” The Obama administration, especially in regard to Russia, Biden says, has chosen a third option: “You make it clear to the country in question, We don’t approve of the behavior in question. We can’t do anything about it, but don’t expect us” to acquiesce “if the only way you’ll trade with us is if we say it’s O.K. you’re beating the hell out of those folks in Tiananmen Square.”

As a past supporter of movements for democracy and self-determination in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Georgia and Kurdistan, Biden does not have to defend his antiauthoritarian credentials; but the Obama administration itself, despite the president’s occasional soaring rhetoric, has come in for some heavy weather from liberals for its reluctance to criticize autocratic allies like Egypt, or to condition aid on democratic reform, as the Bush administration did (albeit with little success). One consequence of Biden’s view may be that authoritarian states have to endure some fairly gentle admonitions while having their way on major issues.

There is a view that Obama’s team is divided between what Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation and The Washington Note, a leading foreign-policy blog, calls “progressive realists” like James Steinberg and “Democratic neocons” — that is, moralists — like Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the U.N. The hard-headed Biden, Clemons says, “can play in both those games.” But this classification scheme explains only so much. It may be more useful to say that this president is pulled both toward the grand project — as in the campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons — and toward the chastened recalibration, as evident in the reined-in language on democracy promotion. The tension falls between the extreme ambitiousness of the goals and the caution required to achieve them — a sense of prudence born in no small part of the failure of George W. Bush’s transformative schemes.

IT IS PRECISELY this tension that has made the debate over Afghanistan so prolonged and difficult. The president called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” as recently as August. Iraq was George W. Bush’s war of necessity; and for Bush that meant authorizing the war and worrying about the consequences later — or perhaps closing his eyes to the consequences. But Obama and his circle of advisers have been bedeviled by doubts about whether the ambitious nationwide counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus, head of Central Command, can actually work. And here Biden’s hard-earned skepticism, his knowledge of the region, his zest for verbal combat and the trust that Obama now reposes in him have allowed him to play a major role in recasting the terms of debate.

Biden was an original believer in the epic project of nation-building in Afghanistan. “Whatever it takes, we should do it,” he said soon after the Taliban government in Kabul was toppled in 2001. He subsequently accused the Bush administration of ignoring Afghanistan, the source of the Qaeda threat, in favor of Iraq. He opposed the surge in Iraq in part because he favored one in Afghanistan. But Biden began to have second thoughts about Afghanistan, as he had about Iraq. As Taliban victories grew, heroin production increased and reports of high-level corruption grew ever more baroque, Biden began to lose faith in Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and in the nation-building project itself. A trip to Afghanistan in the weeks before the new administration took office persuaded Biden that the U.S. military had no clear plan for victory. In the ensuing internal debate over so-called AfPak policy, Biden argued for a narrow definition of success — suppressing Al Qaeda — and no new troops. He lost. Obama added 21,000 new troops; and though he adopted the narrowed goal Biden favored, the new policy asserted that a broad nation-building enterprise would be needed even for this more modest goal.

I asked Biden about Afghanistan when we were in his White House office, with its Colonial blue walls and paintings of Jefferson and Adams and its rather truncated view of the Executive Office Building. (His Senate office, he says, was much nicer.) We were seated in armchairs at oblique angles to each other. Biden is a warm man — an ardent man — who is always trying to dispose of the space between himself and his audience. He cannot talk without making contact; I noticed once or twice that he made a swoop in the direction of my shoe before making do with my knee.

Afghanistan required maximal contact, and the vice president, in an athletic gesture, bent all the way over to tap my toe before wheeling around to face me directly. “When you’re talking about a country which has an 85 percent rate of illiteracy, which has virtually no history of modern governance, you should go in with an overwhelming dose of humility,” he told me. “And you’d better damn well have as precise a notion as you can of what your objective is.”

From the outset of his tenure as vice president, Biden had come to view himself as the one who asked the unpleasant and searching question — who “upset the apple cart,” as he put it. In the debate over Afghanistan, he initially faced a near-consensus in favor of the view advanced by the generals. McChrystal offered three options, which boiled down to way more troops than he could get (80,000), enough troops (40,000), and failure (10,000 trainers but no new combat troops). Obama encouraged Biden to push the advocates to defend their arguments and justify their assumptions. Biden proceeded to do just that, especially with the brass; he proposed an alternative plan that focused less on defeating the Taliban and more on eliminating Al Qaeda. Obama reacted to this very different view by asking James Jones to present four options with different strategies, and troop levels appropriate to those strategies. When I asked Rahm Emanuel about Biden’s role in the discussions, he said: “People were thinking about certain things, but hadn’t expressed them. The vice president was expressing them.”

Biden was not willing to discuss on the record the advice he gave the president while the decision remained outstanding, but the outlines of his views may be gleaned from news reports and White House interviews. Biden and those around him do not seem to believe that McChrystal’s strategy can work — not because they question the abilities of the military, but because they think the generals are far too optimistic about the civilian elements upon which the overall plan depends. They are deeply skeptical that the government of President Hamid Karzai can somehow gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people; that the U.S. can quickly develop the enormous civilian capacity that would accompany a military surge, or can train as many as 400,000 Afghan soldiers, especially with attrition rates now running around 25 percent; that Pakistan will accept a policy designed to bolster Afghanistan’s Pashtun-led government; that NATO allies will overcome public resistance to offer major help; or that the U.S. can afford to spend something like $250 billion on Afghanistan at a time when deficits are already running very high.

Biden does not view the Taliban as synonymous with Al Qaeda and does not appear to believe that it would be a calamity if the Taliban increased its presence in the Afghan countryside (though he is not prepared to see Kabul or other major urban centers fall). If Al Qaeda can be bottled up on the border with Pakistan through counterterrorism measures involving troops as well as drone attacks, and with the help of an expanded Afghan army, then it is unnecessary to build a secure Afghanistan that can defeat the Taliban. And then you could focus instead on the greater danger — Pakistan. “I’m going to ask you a question,” Biden said. “If I said to you right now, We can send $30 billion a year to Pakistan, or $30 billion to Afghanistan, which would you pick? Every goddamn person says, ‘Pakistan.’ So I say, ‘O.K., guys, we should be talking about a PakAf policy, not an AfPak policy.’ ”

This is a thoroughly plausible proposition — if, and only if, ceding much of Afghanistan to the Taliban would not be a calamity. Among those who believe that it would be are Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, most Republican senators and experts like Bruce Riedel, who has said that it is “a fairy tale” to think that Al Qaeda will not return to Afghanistan along with a resurgent Taliban. Those who favor a larger military presence in Afghanistan accept the validity of Biden’s concerns but do not view them as insurmountable. Biden is very likely to once again lose the debate on troop strength, though he may win on narrowing the objectives. The real test of his success will be whether the new policy tilts toward Pakistan.

BY THE TIME Biden returned to Iraq, in mid-September, some of the seeds he planted earlier had begun to sprout. Maliki had made his good-will trip to Kurdistan; Barzani was not describing Maliki as the reincarnation of Saddam Hussein quite as regularly as before. With the election approaching, Maliki and other leaders were crossing sectarian lines to assemble winning coalitions. All talk of constitutional reform was delayed until after the election. Biden, recognizing this, backed off on these issues, focusing instead on the need to agree on an election law as soon as possible in order to ensure that the election could take place on time. In his public remarks, he asserted that the country’s leaders understood that “the election coming off on Jan. 16 is critical to Iraq’s future.” But despite all the fine rhetoric, top Iraqi officials could not agree on an election law, just as they could not agree on almost any other difficult question.

This time Biden was able to fly from Baghdad to Erbil. Baghdad, even now, is an extremely tense place. As soon as we landed in Erbil, however, an official from the Department of Foreign Relations chattered away about the luxury villas at the “Dream City” complex, the new cafes and restaurants, a racetrack and go-kart center. Christians were fleeing Arab Iraq for ecumenical Kurdistan.

The Kurds are very hard to refuse. Kurdistan is a free-market democracy in a part of the world that has very little of either marketplace or democracy. The Kurds suffered terribly at the hands of Saddam Hussein — as they are quick to remind the visitor. Biden told me that the Kurds were not yet prepared to make the concessions over Kirkuk that they would have to make, but that he understood why. “The first thing I remember is when we drove into Erbil to meet with the Kurds,” he said, referring to a 2002 trip. “ ‘Senator, you understand what every Kurdish child learns is: The mountains are our only friend.’ This sense of victimization has a historical basis. This is the Poland of the Middle East.”

And yet Biden understood very well that the Kurds had to be moved off their maximalist position. When Iraqis passed a constitution in 2005, they sidestepped the intractable problem of drawing borders between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, and of the status of Kirkuk, by including Article 140, which called for a national census whose chief goal would be to determine the proportion of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the region. The census would be followed by a referendum on Kirkuk, to be held no later than the end of 2007. But because the Kurds would plainly win the referendum — especially after bringing hundreds of thousands of their countrymen back to the region, in effect reversing Hussein’s own demographic engineering — it had proved impossible to hold the census. Kurdish representatives in Iraq’s Parliament, frustrated by the delay, exacted their revenge by holding up virtually every piece of crucial national legislation. And then the Kurdish regional government passed its own constitution laying claim to all of Kirkuk.

The Kurds had to be persuaded to accept half a loaf: shared jurisdiction over Kirkuk, the loss of some rural areas now claimed as Kurdish. But the Kurds would have none of it. When I said to Fuad Hussein, President Barzani’s chief of staff, that the dispute over Article 140 seemed to have paralyzed Iraq, he shot back, “It is exactly on the contrary: Iraq is paralyzed because there isn’t the will to implement the constitution.” Biden, it was true, had a lot of credit with the Kurds. In late 2002, as war fever was building in Washington, he and Chuck Hagel were driven through the night from Turkey to the Kurdish capital, Erbil. Biden addressed the Kurdish Parliament and made the Kurds’ cause his own. When I asked Barham Salih, the Kurdish prime minister, about Biden, he said, “We trust him as a friend, and as someone who has been aware of the Kurdish predicament for some time.” But, he added, “Biden is not going to convince the Kurds to abandon what are fundamental interests.”

The Kurds were deeply dug in. “Barzani is mercurial,” said a foreign diplomat who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Nobody looks him in the eye and says, ‘You guys are heading for disaster.’ We need the Americans to tell the Kurds that some of their goals are so maximalist that even their iteration is a problem for us.” Specifically, Biden needed to persuade the Kurds that a political agreement acceptable to Arabs as well as Kurds had to come first, and only then could a referendum be held. And with violence growing along the “trigger line” separating Kurdish and Arab territory, it wasn’t clear how long the issue could wait. When I asked the diplomat if the current situation was likely to degenerate into large-scale violence, he said: “On balance, no. But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

How far would the Kurds go? The United States would not support Barzani if he insisted on a referendum either on Article 140 or on the Kurdish Constitution. And Barzani’s leverage may never be greater than it is now, when American troops continue to help police the trigger line, and when Sunni and Shiite political leaders must court the Kurds to achieve an electoral majority. Biden is almost certain to be making these arguments to Barzani. If he has, however, the Kurdish leaders I spoke to seem not to have heard the news. Middle East experts maintain that the problems of borders, and of Kirkuk, constitute the single gravest threat to Iraq’s future.

ONCE AGAIN, MUCH of the key action took place after Biden returned home. The Iraqis remained deadlocked over the electoral law for weeks, with the election itself hanging in the balance. The stumbling block was Kirkuk: Barzani wanted to use the 2009 electoral rolls, reflecting the influx of Kurds. Arab leaders wanted to use data from 2004. The issue finally came to a head earlier this month. Biden was going back and forth on the phone between Maliki and Barzani, conducting what he calls his “condensed, truncated version of shuttle diplomacy.” Antony Blinken says Biden and his team “were in contact in real time.” Over the course of a very long weekend, Blinken told me wonderingly, “different groups were caucusing, making quorums, going out of the room, coming up with new positions. It was democracy in action.” And by Sunday evening, the Arabs and Kurds had reached a compromise.

And then, two weeks later, the compact was upended when Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni, surprised Americans and Iraqis alike by vetoing the electoral law over a provision that he felt would suppress Sunni representation in Iraq’s Parliament. This was the same Vice President al-Hashemi who told me, during a conversation in his Baghdad office in September, that the Iraqi people were fed up with the politics of sectarian rivalry, and then declared that the coalition he was forming would advance “a national agenda which is nonsectarian and nonethnic.” It’s not easy to leave behind deeply ingrained habits.

Iraq is a long way from being a functioning democracy; it’s a long way from being a functioning state. The danger of Kurdistan still looms. The country may well vindicate Biden’s skepticism about America’s ability to shape outcomes abroad. But some Iraqis give him credit for avoiding the mistakes of the past. “This is exactly what the U.S. needs to be doing today — helping us reach compromise, not dictating what the compromise should be,” says Qubad Talabani, the Kurdish regional government’s representative. “It’s a model for American engagement in Iraq today.” Our experience in both Iraq and Afghanistan has offered painful proof that we cannot simply bring refractory states to heel, no matter how much force we bring to bear. We cannot dictate outcomes. We will have to be more patient, more humble and perhaps smarter than we have been.

Patient and humble are not words that come to mind when you think of Joe Biden; yet even his limitations may suit him for this new world. Biden is the one who knows many little things but no big thing. As gifted as he is at retail politics, he has none of Barack Obama’s talent for the sweeping formulation or inspirational language, which perhaps explains why he has fared so poorly in presidential campaigns. Biden does not project even slightly in the realm of myth. But for this very reason, he is allergic to magical, wish-fulfillment thinking. “Guys,” he’ll say — this is how he describes addressing the Joint Chiefs of Staff — “what if it doesn’t work?” An administration full of youthful true believers, enraptured with their heroic leader, needs a skeptic and a scold. Obama may need one himself. And yet Biden is also, like Obama, an optimist. As vice presidents go, he has more in common with Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior, than with dark Dick Cheney. He may well, as Tom Lehrer once sang of Humphrey, dream of staging a coup; but he is likely to remain happy as long as he has apple carts to overturn.

James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Freedom Agenda.”

Delaying Tactics and Dumbing Down

2009-12-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=1318

Barry Sussman: Delaying Tactics and Dumbing Down
November 19th, 2009

There’s a paragraph in a column by E.J. Dionne in the Nov. 19th Washington Post that jumped out at me. The column was about Republican delaying tactics in Congress. It included this thought:

“Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there’s so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?”

Fun, such as a leggy cover photo of Palin in Newsweek, endless coverage elsewhere in print and TV. Palin lets the press avoid real issues.

Look at it like this: Whenever you see Palin on TV, or a Palin spread in a newspaper, that’s time and space and effort that could be devoted to news. It’s not only Palin, there’s always some diversion. Michael Jackson probably is the biggest diversion for 2009. If not them, there are plenty of freak stories available from the tabloids.

Palin, Jackson, missing, murdered girls in Aruba explain why most of the press failed in reporting the runup to the Iraq war, or the housing bubble or so many important stories of somewhat lesser moment. They’re busy elsewhere.

It’s called the dumbing down of America. Used to be, Rupert Murdoch was the leader. Now he’s just one in a crowd.